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Literature review dissertation

Chris Hart (2005) identifies three types of dissertation for a Masters degree. The ‘traditional dissertation’ is usually based on primary data collection to test a hypothesis or proposition or to  fulfill a research aim. The ‘work-based dissertation’ is focused on an issue that is relevant to an organisation with the aim of making recommendations for change. The ‘literature review dissertation’ uses the literature to explore an issue or argument or the origins of an idea or to provide evidence for decision-making.

He suggests that a literature review dissertation has four, generic stages

Hart p.140

 

Reference: Hart, Chris. Doing your masters dissertation. Sage, 2005.

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Entrepeneurship: six types of start-up

In this video, Steve Blank identifies six different types of startup:

  1. lifestyle start-up – an enterprise where a single entrepreneur makes a sufficient living out of pursuing a passion (for example surfing);
  2. small business startup – intended to be a nothing more than a profitable small enterprise such as family grocery store;
  3. scalable start-up – the founders have £billion ambitions for growth to become a large company;
  4. large company sustaining innovation – initiatives within a large company to stimulate innovation in order to maintain competitive position.;
  5. buyable start-up – a startup intended to be sold to a large corporation once the business model has been shown to work; and
  6. social entrepreneurship start-ups.

Blank argues that these each need different entrepreneurial skillsets.

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A business model helps to answer the question …

A business model helps to answer the question: how do you plan to make money? Behind that question are other questions:

  • Who’s your target customer?
  • What customer problem or challenge do you solve?
  • What value do you deliver?
  • How will you reach, acquire, and keep customers?
  • How will you define and differentiate your offering?
  • How will you generate revenue?
  • What’s your cost structure?
  • What’s your profit margin?

 

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Trust status: where next?

Purpose

Lipson Learning Cooperative Trust began with two schools in its charge: a large secondary school and a small to medium sized primary school. But now, after the creation of Lipson Cooperative Academy, only the primary school remains within the original trust. Are the constitutional arrangements of the trust appropriate for the changed circumstances? I think not, mainly because they are now top heavy. The purpose of this posting is to explore the options for dealing with this.

Continue reading “Trust status: where next?”

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First explorers

Sustainability – what it means and how business should engage with the concept – has been a recurring theme over the past few years for my MSc research students at the University of Warwick. Recently I attended a workshop entitled Flourishing is the Outcome at Plymouth University’s Futures Entrepreneurship Centre. It was run by Antony Upward of Edward James Consulting Ltd. An updated set of the slides Antony used are here. He explained that his work was an extension of the business model ontology developed by Alex Osterwalder. Then he showed how the resulting Flourishing Business Canvas and its associated toolkit enable us to describe strongly sustainable business models, i.e. businesses which are sufficiently profitable while simultaneously creating social and environmental benefits. I was impressed: the approach ties together the various strands in a beautifully elegant way.

Two of my students this year are doing an MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Their projects require each to develop a business model and the Flourishing Business Canvas might be an excellent tool for that purpose. So I have approached Antony to explore the possibility of us joining his group of First Explorers who, in return for giving feedback on their experience using the tool (so that it can be improved) get a free license to use the Flourishing Business Innovation Toolkit including the Canvas. Background information about all this is in the links below.

Three minute video to introduce the ideas
A 300 word explanation in plain English
One page overview of the research project
A deeper dive into the ideas
Details of the evaluation process

Antony presented a colloquium covering the research behind the Flourishing Business Canvas on 5 December at the University of Hamburg.  The Prezi presentation he made is here and the video of the presentation is available here.

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Parent

The term ‘parent’ is defined in section 576 of the Education Act 1996 as:

  • parents of a pupil;
  • any person who is not a parent of a pupil but who has parental responsibility for the pupil;
  • any person who has care of the pupil.
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Quality of case study design

Yin (2009, p.40) identifies four, widely-used tests for judging the quality of research design:
  • “Construct validity: identifying correct operational measures for the concepts being studied;
  • Internal validity (for explanatory or causal studies only and not for descriptive or exploratory studies): seeking to establish a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are believed to lead to other conditions, as distinguished from spurious relationships;
  • External validity: defining the domain to which a study’s findings can be generalized;
  • Reliability: demonstrating that the operations of a study – such as the data collection procedures – can be repeated, with the same results.“

In the figure below he summarises, for a case study, what tactics are appropriate for each test and the phase of research in which the tactic applies.

 case-study-tactics
Reference:
YIN, R. K. 2009. Case study research: Design and methods, Sage publications, INC.