Family Business
Prepare for leadership positions within a family firm, and understand the dynamics that are special to family businesses.
Overview
Family businesses are the dominant form of business operation within the state of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. It's vital to understand the unique dynamics within a family business to equip family members and non-family consultants and executives with the added expertise they need to help a thriving family firm endure.
You'll graduate with the insights to balance the business, the family and employees, and leverage new opportunities, for example, broadening the portfolio of assets. Our sequence of courses provide you with the skills to address stewardship and governance of the business, or also successfully consult for Oregon's many successful family businesses.
With a focus on entrepreneurship, your family business studies will give you the opportunity to develop your entrepreneurial talents while providing a solid foundation to face the risks and challenges facing a family firm. Course work on finance, legal expertise, marketing, and succession planning help to prepare you for a leadership role in a family business.
Family business is an option for business administration majors in Corvallis or for online business administration majors with Ecampus. Family business also is offered as a minor for non-business majors.
Creative, driven and a design trailblazer? Turn your passion into a career with a degree in apparel design. Apparel design harnesses creativity and artistic skill with cutting-edge technology, process and design thinking. We're the No. 1 apparel design program in Oregon, and ranked 14th in the nation.
Our business administration degree provides you with broad business skills in accounting and quantitative methods, an understanding of the legal and social environment of business, and a background in management and organizational behavior, marketing, finance, and operations management.
You'll learn through hands-on experience and case study to be able to bridge real-world problems with technical solutions. The main goal is to train people who understand how to extract insight from data and translate the insight into competitive advantage.
You'll graduate not only with strong technical skills and proficiency in various data analytics tools, but also the ability to identify opportunities for data-driven solutions. You'll understand the financial and operational implications of data-driven solutions you've discovered.
Our design and innovation management degree focuses on the intersection of design and business, bringing together analytic and creative problem-solving skills. You'll focus on how design can be integrated into an organization from a management and strategic perspective and learn the value that design and innovation can bring to an organization.
Our interior design program explores how spaces look, feel and function. Using a human-centered approach, students learn how the design of the built environment impacts our productivity, health and emotions. We prepare critical thinkers who can work both independently and as effective members of design teams.
You’ll graduate with a solid business foundation in merchandising topics including global sourcing, consumer behavior, retail merchandise planning and others. And, you're learning with the best — our program is ranked No. 12 in the nation, and No. 1 on the west coast for fashion merchandising by fashion-schools.org.
Ways to Attend
We offer class in the modalities that work for you and your schedule.
Attend in-person in Corvallis and attend your classes in Austin Hall, one of the crown jewels of the OSU campus.
Study through Ecampus online an make your degree as convient as you need it to be.
Request More Information
Ready to take the next steps? Complete the form to receive detailed information about our programs and how they might work for you.
Center for Family Enterprise Program impacts Oregon
The Center for Family Enterprise, formally known as Austin Family Business Program, recognizes the need to invest in Oregon’s innovators and business owners because we are essentially a small-business state. In Oregon small and family businesses dominate the business landscape; in some areas 90% of Oregon businesses are classified as small businesses, and of those, 75% have four or fewer employees.
Family-owned businesses have to remain entrepreneurial and innovative in order to thrive and grow. The OSU College of Business is one of just one hundred U.S. universities that have resources specialized to family business as part of our academic programming.
