Dr. Matt Allen is the John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises and Executive Director of the Ward Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His expertise is in the area of family learning, family entrepreneurship and the development of the next generation. Professor Allen has taught entrepreneurship and family entrepreneurship courses at the undergraduate, graduate and executive levels. His teaching approach has earned him numerous awards and invitations including the Poets and Quants Best Undergraduate Business Professors for 2020. At the executive level, Professor Allen has worked with audiences across the globe with a special interest in Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American markets. Prior to his appointment at Kellogg, Professor Allen was a faculty member in the entrepreneurship department at Babson College where he founded the Center for Family Entrepreneurship and developed Babson’s curriculum for family entrepreneurship.

As a youth and young adult after college, Professor Allen worked for his own family’s business so the issues business families face are personal and relevant to him. His research addresses how families learn, how to prepare the next generation for their individual roles, and how family members can be more entrepreneurial individually and as a family. This research is creating a fundamental shift in the understanding of how families learn and how business families are taught in university and executive programs. Professor Allen is a leader in the field of family entrepreneurship and his research has been published in top academic and practitioner outlets including the Harvard Business Review, Personnel Psychology and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.

Professor Allen is active as a consultant to family businesses around the world and in addition to his independent consulting work has done work in partnership with various global family business consultancies. In addition to the experience gained working for his family’s business, he worked as a financial analyst at both IBM and Hewlett Packard before entering academia. Professor Allen earned his B.A. in accounting from the University of Utah, M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and Ph.D. from Cornell University.