Course - Skills Lab 4
(300342-B-1.5)
, Business research
Business research is a series of well thought out activities and carefully executed data analyses
that help a manager to avoid, solve, or minimize a problem.
● Good research tends to lead to better decision making than intuitive thinking;
● Experience without research also leads to bad decision making.
Knowledge about business research helps you:
1. Perform business research - Solve (smaller) problems
2. Steer business research - Interact with researchers
3. Evaluate business research - Discriminate between good and bad research
There are two general types of research:
1. Deductive research
a. Theory -> data
b. Testing theory
2. Inductive research
a. Data -> theory
b. Building theory
We focus on deductive research. As such, we follow the 7-step deductive research process:
1. Define the business problem
2. Formulate the problem statement
3. Develop the theoretical background
4. Choose a research design
5. Collect the data
6. Analyze the data
7. Write down
Skillslab 4 focuses on step 1-3