Description
Congratulations! You are on your last 2-week assignment. So far, you have worked on interacting with research in two ways: examining research as you would for an academic paper and examining research as a basis for creating a research-based industry project. For this assignment, you are going to step away from writing literature reviews and instead critically think about Business Development plans from the a methodological perspective. This means that I want you to think about using qualitative and quantitative data in a business plan as well as the issues involved with credibility, validity, and reliability that arise from using this type of data.
Here is a sample table of contents for a business plan as it is done in the final course of the program:
A. Executive Summary
B. Company Overview
C. Products and Services
D. Target Market
E. Marketing and Sales Plan
F. Milestones and Metrics
G. Management Team
H. Financial Plan
References
With this in mind, answer the following questions for your assignment. These answers should be in paragraph form. One to two sentence answers are not sufficient. This does not need to be formatted as an essay but instead can be more of a “traditional” homework format where you have numbers by each answer.
1) When developing a business plan, both industry and academic research would be used. Which sections would use qualitative research? Which sections would use quantitative research? Which sections would use both? Justify your answers.
2) What issues of credibility do you think would arise when creating a business plan? Be specific as to what sections you think would have credibility issues and explain why you think this.
3) What issues of validity and reliability do you think you might have in using publicly available information? Which sections of the business plan would this specifically impact? How would you address these concerns in your business plan? For example, we use measures like Cronbach’s Alpha and Pearson’s R in quantitative studies but that is not typically found in industry data. Is this something you can address or would this be a limitation of the data?
4) Taking a step back from academic research, discuss how you would expect financial data to be assessed by potential investors. What do you think you could do to make this appear as convincing as possible?
This assignment needs to be in 12 point, times new roman, double spaced, and free of contractions. Points will be deducted for issues with spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation. The assignment should be a minimum of 2 pages not include a title page and any references if you choose to use them. All assignments must be submitted with your name on them to receive credit.
