A multistate research group that includes Ramona Heck of Cornell University has been named winner of a prestigious award for its research on family businesses.

The group has examined in more detail than ever before not only the economic impact of family businesses but also the relationships among the family, the business and the community. The group has found, for example, that more than 18 million U.S. households (almost 14 percent of the total) own at least one business and together represent about half of both the nation's gross domestic product and total wages.

The project, Family Business Viability in Economically Vulnerable Communities, a U.S. Department of Agriculture Northeastern Multistate Research Project, has won the Northeastern Regional Agricultural Experiment Station Directors Research Award for Excellence. The award was presented Jan. 30 at the directors' annual meeting at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Heck, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell and the J. Thomas Clark Fellow of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise, directs the New York land grant component of the project. The research group, composed of 12 land grant institutions, has collaborated since 1987 and has studied 794 family businesses in great detail. It has concluded that "business-owning families and their businesses are multidimensional, nonlinear and dynamic entities of great social and economic value."

The group was recognized for quantifying the economic and social contributions of family businesses to their local, state and national economies and communities; for developing state extension materials for business owners, their families and policy makers; and for producing numerous academic publications on family functioning, management and business viability.