Description
1’ writing 3000 words report based on proposal
Structure
Your research report must have the following sections:
1. Executive summary: brief presentation (bullet points) of your topic/question, methodological
approach, and, more importantly, main findings/insights/implications (must fit on 1 page)
2. Introduction: brief context of the study. Focus on the key reason(s) that make this study
relevant from an innovation/entrepreneurship perspective.
3. Literature review: describe the state of the art. Identify key studies/research, particularly
through the lens of the theories, empirical methods and data used.
4. Research questions: what objectives you plan to achieve with this research and the
scope/audience of your work (optionally: identify the knowledge gap you want to fill).
5. Research methods: make a distinction between two parts
o 5.1: data evaluation. Discuss critically the sources you have used and identify the gaps
in data availability. This is where you present all the technical aspects about data:
quality, exhaustivity, relevance, methods (quantitative methods, data transformation,
…) in order to focus the rest of your work on your research questions, not the
methodological choices and challenges.
o 5.2: link your research objectives to the data/variables that would help make
informed decisions. Show how your data and method will provide useful insights and
implications for data-driven decision-making.
6. Results: show your quantitative analysis and data visualisation. Structure the presentation
based on the rationale shown in 5.2: e.g., different perspectives on the issue (customers,
businesses, policy, …), different levels of analysis (macro/national level, city/region level,
business level, micro/individual customer or manager level), etc.
7. Discussion: synthetise your results to generate clear answers to your research questions,
while contrasting/comparing your findings with the knowledge from the literature.
8. Conclusions and recommendations: synthetise your entire work to show the new
knowledge/insights/implications that you have created for business and/or policy.
9. References [identify academic sources listed in the Journal Quality List by putting a ‘*’ in front
of the item, see p. 6]
