Abstract
The European Institute of Design (IED) is a school for higher education, founded in Milan in 1966. As a business venture it had two objectives: first, to fill the gap in services provided by Italian state universities who offered no courses in fashion, design or visual arts, thus becoming the main provider of training in the creative aspects of Made in Italy; second, to offer a hands-on form of training oriented towards practical problem-solving. IED is a highly internationalised family firm; the major shareholder is still the founder, who personally controlled the strategic management and running of the institute until 2002, when a CEO was appointed in order to begin a process of restructuring of the organisational set up and competitive strategies with the aim of turning IED into a managerial model. The resulting transition is a typical example of change management of an European and Italian SME, which took place via a complex process aiming at the formulation of new strategies, the identification of new organisational structures and the putting into place of new working processes. Moreover, the contradictory and multidirectional nature of the change process at IED makes it a starting point for examining two related topics: that of the family business and its transition towards a managerial form of running and that of the growth in size of small and medium enterprises.