Kent State Presents the 26th Annual Ohio Employee Ownership Conference on April 20

Kent State University will host the 26th Annual Ohio Employee Ownership Conference on Friday, April 20, at the Hilton West in Fairlawn, Ohio. The theme for the conference, presented by Kent State’s Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), is “Employee Ownership: Simply a Better Way of Doing Business.”

“Ohio, along with the rest of the United States, is beginning to see signs of a recovery from the most severe economic crisis of the last seven decades,” said Steve Clem, OEOC senior program coordinator. “Employee-owned companies are certainly not immune to the ups and downs of the economy. However, they often do save jobs and companies, anchor capital locally, benefit local economies and create new wealth for employee owners.”

Participants at the 26th Annual Ohio Employee Ownership Conference will hear from keynote speaker Joseph Blasi, Ph.D., a world-leading authority on employee ownership, named in 2010 as the inaugural J. Robert Beyster Professor of Employee Ownership at Rutgers University. 


Blasi has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Organization at Princeton University, a visiting professor at the Yale School of Management and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School. He also serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.


Last year’s conference attracted 325 people. Widely regarded as the “best one-day conference on employee ownership in the country,” this annual event brings together employee owners, both management and shop floor workers, to learn how to improve the performances of their companies.  

The conference also attracts community and economic development professionals, government officials, nonprofit organizations, students and professional service providers. Over the course of the day, 19 panels (some featuring CEOs and CFOs from several of Ohio’s employee-owned companies) will provide participants with the opportunity to learn more about topics ranging from the basics of employee ownership to more technical issues, such as fiduciary responsibility, repurchase obligation, and valuation, to visions for the next decade of employee ownership.

The conference will be held from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. on Friday, April 20, at the Hilton West in Fairlawn, Ohio, followed by a reception until 6 p.m. Registration begins at 8 a.m. The cost is $150 in advance and $195 at the door. For more information, call 330-672-3028 or visit http://oeockent.org.

Kent State’s OEOC is a non-profit program established in 1987 to provide outreach, information and preliminary technical assistance to Ohio employees and business owners interested in exploring employee ownership. Since its inception, the OEOC has helped nearly 15,000 Ohio employees become owners. 


For more information, visit http://oeockent.org.

Media Contacts:
Steve Clem, cclem@kent.edu, 330-672-0335
Bob Burford, rburford@kent.edu, 330-672-8516