Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Refining my research proposal idea

With some of my minor assignments out of the way, I have now returned to my dissertation topic and proposal. Based on feedback in class and learning about ethics review at FIMS, I am totally scaling down the topic. One of the issues that I am deciding to do is to study documents rather than people in order to escape Ethics board. However today, I became much more closer to identifying who I would study after reading a newspaper article. This I will elaborate on some more in this post.

One of the issues that came up with my research topic was that the definition of small business is very wide, and within contemporary studies of small business owners, there are several typologies and niche groups. I have heard of Women-owned businesses, family-owned businesses, and as of lately - mompreneurs. For the latter, I actuall saw this term in an issue of the Western News here at UWO entitled:  "Exploring the motivations of 'Mompreneurs'" by Paul Mayne published on October 13, 2011. See the link for the article: http://communications.uwo.ca/western_news/stories/2011/October/exploring_the_motivations_of_mompreneurs.html


Today, another newspaper kind of helped me to pick a niche group of small businesses that I think I want to study. This is the group of college students and/or college graduate entrepreneurs. I am not sure what is the right term for them yet and the type of business that they would be classified as. But I do know that I want to narrow my focus these as a user group in need of online business information/library services.

In an article in the London Metro, entitled: "It’s been a pleasure doing business", Vered Ben gives her experience of how she has started 2 businesses during her studies (page 14).  You can also read her story via the link: http://www.metronews.ca/london/learn/article/1019449--it-s-been-a-pleasure-doing-business. In the closing paragraph of her article, Ben states that:

"Most career centres and schools focus a lot on grades, career options and resumes, and usually do not let students think outside the box when it comes to job searching. I think schools should help students see that working for yourself can be a great option."
I believe than more universities are doing exactly that, and will in another post collect some of those articles to demonstrate that point.

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