Course: MNGT-E3001 - Researching Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Master's thesis seminar), Lecture, 4.11.2022-16.12.2022

Introduction

Welcome to the Researching Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Master's thesis seminar) course (MNGT-E3001)!

The primary aim of this course is to introduce Master's students in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management to the basic steps of conducting research in their field of specialisation and help them to apply it to their planned master thesis.

In essence, research in entrepreneurship and innovation consists of asking important questions and using scientific methods to design and implement ways of answering these questions. There is generally no one right way to approach these issues (although there are definitely wrong ways!). Instead, research in entrepreneurship and innovation consists of numerous choices that involve trade-offs. We will start the course by introducing relevant topic areas in entrepreneurship and innovation to have an idea about what is 'hot' in this field at the moment. We then address the research process (including identifying research questions, philosophy of science) and trade-offs among research designs such as the choice to use qualitative versus quantitative methods. We will also cover main qualitative and quantitative methods applied in entrepreneurship and innovation research.

It is important to know that it is up to your own interest and needs to choose the order in which you proceed in this course. The topics are already organized in a suitable order. Each topic comes with a set of readings and in most cases short introductory videos. Please note that neither the topics nor the readings covered should be considered to be exhaustive. We simply cannot cover everything in the time allotted. The purpose is to provide a solid foundation in the important issues related to each topic and the field as a whole. The overall goal of the course is to help prepare students to develop interesting research questions and pursue answers to them by using appropriate scientific methods. These are essential prerequisites for a successful Master's thesis.

Before engaging with the sessions of this course please take a look at the more detailed description of the course structure below, and see the Syllabus (top-right corner on this page) and familiarise yourself with the main requirements to complete the course successfully.

Please make sure to familiarize yourself with the preliminary assignment. Without submitting this short piece of work, it will not be possible for you to go on with this course.

For any enquiry regarding this course please contact thomas.hoeger@aalto.fi

Happy learning!

Course Structure and Materials

The course consists of 8 topics that cover the basics of qualitative and quantitative research:

Basics of Qualitative Research in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management

Topic 1: Different qualitative approaches to inquiry
Topic 2: Observation and Note-Taking
Topic 3: Interviewing and non-mainstream approaches to collect data
Topic 4: Qualitative Data Analysis

Basics of Quantitative Research in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management

Topic 5: Quantitative Data
Topic 6: From Theory to Empirics
Topic 7: Quantitative Analysis
Topic 8: Interpreting and Publishing Research Findings

Each topic will include reading materials and videos that will introduce you to the core themes. In addition, you may be asked to independently look for more information.

Online sessions

Introductory session on Friday 4.11.

We will organize an online introductory session on the course on Friday 4th of November at 14.15-16.00. Participation is voluntary, but recommended.

Feedback sessions on 25.11. and 16.12.

The course includes two obligatory assignments (20 points for assignment 1 and 32 points for assignment 2) that allows you to develop your skills as a researcher, and to work on a topic that is of interest to you. We offer an online feedback session after each of the obligatory assignments:

The first feedback session is on Friday 25th of November at 14.15-16.00.
The second feedback session is on Friday 16th of December at 14.15-16.00.

Participation in the feedback sessions is voluntary.

The Introductory and Feedback sessions will be organized in a Zoom Meeting.

To join the meeting:

https://aalto.zoom.us/j/6435483326

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Assignments

Preliminary Assignment

Since this course should help and assist you in the process of your master thesis paper, you should already have a rough idea about the topic you want to proceed. Small changes might still occur, but the overall direction should already be present. Therefore you need to submit till tuesday the 1st of November already some first ideas about your future research project. You will find more information about it under the "Assignments" section. And don't stress out too much about this. This should just be a kind of ground work we will then work on, allocate you to your supervisor and know which research methods you should focus on for the upcoming assignments.

Obligatory Assignments – due 22.11. and 16.12.

The course includes two obligatory assignments (20 points and 32 points) that allow you to develop your skills as a researcher, and to work on a topic that is of interest to you. The first assignment focuses on either on Qualitative or Quantitative Research (depending on your planned master thesis topic) and it is due Tuesday the 22nd of November at 10 am. The second assignment will focus on your particular research methodology and it is due Friday the 16th of December at 10 am.

You must complete and pass these 2 obligatory assignments in order to pass the course. However, note that they only amount to a maximum of 52 points of the total 100 points of this course and it might be very difficult to reach the maximum amount of points. In order to pass the course, you need to collect a minimum of 50 points from these exercises and the assignments. Therefore I strongly encourage you to also work on the exercises.

We offer an online feedback session after each of the obligatory assignments (see information above). The participation is voluntary.

Topic Exercises – due 22.11. and 16.12.

In association to each topic there are two small exercises (3 points each), which test the comprehension of the topic and help you to develop skills to critically read and evaluate scientific research. These exercises are voluntary. However, if you do not complete them, you will automatically loose the points they are worth, and cannot get the highest grade from the course. Altogether the voluntary exercises amount to a maximum of 48 points of the total 100 points of this course (8 session, 2 exercises in each session, 3 points for each exercise).

The first set of exercises (Either 1-4 (Qualitative) or 5-8 (Quantitative); depending on your planned master thesis research framework) are due Tuesday the 22nd of November, and the second set of exercises are due due till Friday the 16th of December at 10 am.

Elaboration of the Evaluation Criteria and Methods

In order to pass the course, you need to collect a minimum of 50 points in the exercises and assignments. Note, it is mandatory to submit both assignments, but you may choose the number of exercises. If you decide to skip some exercises you will no longer have the possibility to score maximum points, as in each exercise you can score a maximum of 3 points of the final grade.

For more information on the points to grade conversion, see Table below:

Course Evaluation Overview
Course Requirements	Weighting (Points)
1. Qualitative Research Exercises	24
Assignment 1	20
Quantitative Research Exercises	24
Assignment 2	32
Total	100

Points conversion scale	Final grade (official scale)
90 - 100	5
80 - 89	4
70 - 79	3
60 - 69	2
50 - 59	1
0 - 49	0 (Fail)

Suggested schedule

This is a self-paced online course, and as such the students can decide how to allocate the topics according to their own speed, needs and interests. Just keep in mind the exercise and assignment deadlines

Class Schedule

04 November – 16 December 2022
Week 1	01.11.-06.11.	Preliminary Exercise due till Tuesday 1st of November at 10 am Introduction session on Friday, 4th of November at 14.15 Finish time zone (optional)
Week 2	07.11.-13.11.	Topic 1: Different qualitative approaches to inquiry and Sampling Topic 2: Observation and Note-taking
Week 3	14.11.-20.11.	Topic 3: Interviewing and non-mainstream approaches to collect data Topic 4: Qualitative Data Analysis
Week 4	21.11.-27.11.	Assignment 1 and Exercises (Topics 1-4) due on Tuesday 22.11. at 10 am Feedback Session on Friday 25.11. at 14.15 Finish time zone (optional)
Week 5	28.11.-04.12.	Topic 5: Quantitative Data Topic 6: From Theory to Empirics
Week 6	05.12.-11.12.	Topic 7: Quantitative Analysis Topic 8: Interpreting and Publishing Research Findings
Week 7	12.12.-16.12.	Assignment 2 and Exercises (Topics 5-8) due on Friday 16.12. at 10am Feedback Session on Friday 16.12. at 14.15 Finish time zone (optional)

Some suggestions to create learning synergies with other Aalto courses:

This course works complementary to other Aalto research method courses, such as ‘26E02900 Doing Quantitative Analysis’ or ‘21E00011 Doing Qualitative Research’.

If you are interested in learning more about entrepreneurship and innovation management research, or you are writing a thesis on the topic, we recommend to combine this course with the online course ‘25E55000 Entrepreneurship and Society’ to strengthen your theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship research.

Materials

Assignments

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND DEADLINES

Preliminary Assignment - due Tuesday 1st of November

Since this course should help and assist you in the process of your master thesis paper, you should already have a rough idea about the topic you want to proceed.

Therefore please put these onto paper and hand them in before we start with our first session. This should be the ground work we will then work on, allocate you to your supervisor and know which research methods you should focus on for the upcoming obligatory assignments. You will find more details about the preliminary assignment further down. The submission guidelines also apply for the preliminary exercise.

Topic Exercises – due 22.11. and 16.12.

In association to each topic there are two small exercises (3 points each), which test the comprehension of the topic and help you to develop skills to critically read and evaluate scientific research. These exercises are voluntary. However, if you do not complete them, you will automatically loose the points they are worth, and cannot get the highest grade from the course. Altogether the voluntary exercises amount to a maximum of 48 points of the total 100 points of this course (8 session, 2 exercises in each session, 3 points for each exercise).

The first set of exercises are due on 22nd of November. The second set of exercises are done by 16th of December. Depending if your future master thesis is focusing on qualitative or quantitative research, you should submit the exercises in from your research field. Working with this groundwork will help prepare you to do obligatory assignment number 1. The other topics, even though not part of your future master thesis research, are still part of your class and the topic exercises. These have to be done after obligatory assignment number 1 with the deadline of 22nd of November.

Obligatory assignments - due 22.11. and 16.12.

The course includes two obligatory assignments (20 points and 32 points) that allow you to develop your skills as a researcher, and to work on a topic that is of interest to you. The first assignment focuses on either on Qualitative or Quantitative Research (depending on your planned master thesis topic) and it is due Tuesday the 22nd of November. The second assignment will focus on your particular research methodology and it is due Friday the 16th of December.

You must complete and pass these 2 obligatory assignments in order to pass the course. However, note that they only amount to a maximum of 52 points of the total 100 points of this course and it might be very difficult to reach the maximum amount of points. In order to pass the course, you need to collect a minimum of 50 points from these exercises and the assignments. Therefore I strongly encourage you to also work on the exercises.

We offer an online feedback session after each of the obligatory assignments (see information above). The participation is voluntary.

READINGS

Please, see the Materials section for all the readings and research papers that are referred to in the exercises.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submission formats

Submit all exercises and assignments on MyCourses. Note that the two assignments will be submitted via Turnitin (to check for plagiarism) in MyCourses.

Format

The work must be presented in the following format:

Font: Times New Roman
Size: 12
Spacing: 1.5
Alignment: justified
Pages: numbered
Margins: ‘normal’ in MS Word
Filename format: SURNAME First Name-Year-ID-ASSIGNMENT INITIALS.docx (example: Hoeger Thomas-2020-1234567-A1.docx)

Late/Non-Submissions

Late assignments will lose 10 points per 24-hour period: this will be enforced as soon as the deadline is missed, as indicated by the timestamp in Turnitin. If an assignment is three or more days late, the grade will be converted to a zero for that assignment.

Referencing and Research Ethics

Citation Style: Harvard Referencing (See Materials section)

Academic excellence and high achievement levels are only possible in an environment where the highest standards of academic honesty and integrity are maintained. Students are expected to abide by the Aalto University Code of Academic Integrity, other relevant codes and regulations, as well as the canons of ethical conduct within the disciplines of business and management education.

For Aalto users

Welcome to this online course on qualitative and quantitative research methods!

This Master-level course introduces you to research methods applied in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation management. It follows self-paced learning principles, and offers some flexibility in deciding the order of learning topics. In particular, the course focuses on how to collect reliable data by providing exercises for different data collection techniques, such as interviews, observations, surveys, and secondary data (e.g. news articles, tweets, Facebook/Youtube comments). Further, the course focuses on how to do good qualitative research by introducing and challenging you on some of the most common qualitative research designs, as well as offering training in techniques for qualitative analysis, for example the ‘Gioia method’, discourse analysis, critical incident analysis, visual methods, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The course also addresses how to do good quantitative research by learning some basic techniques for conducting statistical analysis, such as descriptive statistics, bivariate and partial correlations, factor analysis, reliability tests, linear regression and logistic regression, as well as challenging you to review its application in published studies. In sum, through a number of small exercises you engage with the basics of qualitative as well as quantitative research, and engage more deeply in one research methodology of your interest in the final assignment.

We hope this course supports developing your academic knowledge and skills.

Some suggestions to create learning synergies with other Aalto courses:

This course works complementary to other Aalto research method courses, such as ‘26E02900 Doing Quantitative Analysis’ or ‘21E00011 Doing Qualitative Research’.

If you are interested in learning more about entrepreneurship and innovation management research, or you are writing a thesis on the topic, we recommend to combine this course with the online course ‘25E55000 Entrepreneurship and Society’ to strengthen your theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship research.

Introduction - Usefulness of Theory in Research

Not available

Introduction - Research Paradigms in a Nutshell

Not available

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

‘What are the most important factors in your life?’or ‘Why do you prefer listening to heavy metal music more than other music genres?’

or applied to the study of entrepreneurship: ‘What challenges are encountered by people who switch careers and become entrepreneurs later in life?’ or ‘How do entrepreneurs manage volunteer retention in prosocial business venturing?’

In order to answer these questions, it would be most appropriate to turn to qualitative research. However, qualitative research is not a single body of methods and techniques that help you to understand real world phenomena. Instead qualitative research is characterized by a wide variety of qualitative approaches to inquiry, i.e. research designs, including numerous, sometimes competing, paradigm (worldviews). Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to first clarify the research approach, often called the research design, you follow when conducting a qualitative research project. Therefore, the first session on qualitative research will familiarize you with some of the more common qualitative research designs.

Ones you have gained clarity on the research design and you have formulated a research question that you want to study, you are confronted with an important question: ‘What kind of data should I collect?’

Oftentimes, in qualitative research the data is collected from multiple sources that can be categorized as interview data, observations and secondary data, such as reports and statistics. As secondary data is collected by someone other than the researcher him-/herself, we have dedicated two sessions to develop a more systematic approach to collecting interview data and data from non-participant observations. You might still wonder, is asking people their opinions really ‘research’?

Miles, Huberman and Saldana (2014, p. 24) clarify that “qualitative data are a source of well-grounded, rich descriptions and explanations of human processes. With qualitative data, one can preserve chronological flow, see which events led to which consequences, and derive fruitful explanations. Then, too, good qualitative data are more likely to lead to serendipitous findings and to new integrations; they help researchers get beyond initial conceptions and generate or revise conceptual frameworks. Finally, the findings from well analysed qualitative studies have a quality of ‘undeniability’. Words, especially organized into incidents or stories, have a concrete, vivid, and meaningful flavour that often proves far more convincing to a reader—another researcher, a policymaker, or a practitioner—than pages of summarized numbers.”

Thus, after finishing the qualitative research module you can confidently say, yes qualitative research is a scientific mode of inquiry that can help us to understand the world. However, we are still missing an important part of qualitative research, that is qualitative data analysis. While this demands several courses, in one module we want you to at least get a glimpse of the methodological repertoire that has been developed, and is constantly developing. Put simply, we want you to get a better understanding of how we can draw valid and trustworthy meaning from qualitative data and what methods of analysis we can use that are practical and will get us knowledge that we and others can rely on.

Topic 1 - Different Qualitative Research Approaches

When you hear people speak about qualitative research, it is easy to think that there is one approach to learn about. But, as you will learn about quantitative research, many varieties of qualitative research exist. Among the most common approaches is grounded theory and variations thereof. A reason for that could be that grounded theory tries to provide explanations and develop a theory behind the activities and events that management scholars study. Another reason might be that over the years, different ontological and epistemological foundations, have been assumed that have amended grounded theories into camps of researchers. But perhaps, it is simply because grounded theory assumes that the researcher has no interpretative frame (or theory) in his mind when studying a phenomenon. This is also sometimes phrased to mean that the researcher has no ‘a priori’ knowledge about what he/she studies. However, this is misleading, because even the most senior researchers can apply a grounded theory approach to study the world. Therefore, it is important to learn what grounded theory means and some of the different approaches that are used. Hence, in this session you will learn about three of the most prominent grounded theory scholars referenced in entrepreneurship and innovation management studies: Ann Langley, Dennis Gioia, and Kathy Eisenhardt.

However, this session will not stop with introducing one approach; it will also include some other common approaches, namely phenomenology, narrative research (hermeneutics), ethnography and case study. According to Creswell (2007), trying to allocate and categorize qualitative research into these five groups, provides you with a solid basis for becoming well-versed in qualitative research.

Readings

Gehman, J., Glaser, V. L., Eisenhardt, K. M., Gioia, D., Langley, A., & Corley, K. G. (2017). Finding theory–method fit: A comparison of three qualitative approaches to theory building. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(3) 284-300.

Creswell, J. (2007). Chapter 4: Five Qualitative Approaches to Inquiry, in Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches.p.53-84

If you are interested to learn more about research design, look at the additional reading:

Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (1990). Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology, 13(1), 3-21.

Videos

1. Moerman – Introducing Hermeneutics (Narrative Research)

2. Moerman – Introducing Phenomenology

3. Moerman – Introducing Ethnography

4. Moerman – Introducing Grounded Theory

5. Moerman – Variations of Grounded Theory

Exercises

Exercise 1.1 – Comprehend

After getting acquainted with the materials (readings, videos), formulate five research questions that suit the following research designs (one research question per research design): an ethnography, a hermeneutic study, a phenomenology, a case study, and a grounded theory study.

Exercise 1.2 – Critique

Carefully read Gehman et al. (2017) and explain what are differences between Langley, Eisenhardt and Gioia in their methodological approaches to grounded theory research.

Self-Assessment Checklist

Please check. Did you gain an understanding of the following?

you know what is ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics and case study
you can broadly distinguish qualitative research into 5 categories (as suggested by Creswell)
you are aware of different approaches to grounded theory research

If you can answer everything with a confident Yes! then you have achieved the learning objective of this session.

Topic 2 - Observation and Note-taking

Observation is a systematic data collection approach. Researchers use all of their senses to examine people in natural settings or naturally occurring situations. Some qualitative research methodologies, in particular ethnography, rely on such participant and non-participant observationas an essential data source. Having its origins in anthropology and ethnology, nowadays social sciences, in general, increasingly apply observation techniques. This session is designed to provide a brief introduction to this well-established data collection method often applied to study cultural phenomena.

The benefits of systematically collecting participant and non-participant observation data is that it fosters an in-depth and rich understanding of a phenomenon, situation and/or setting, and the behaviour of the participants in that setting. As such, a deeper immersion or at least a prolonged involvement in a setting helps you to develop rapport and might further lead to a free and open discussion with people. In entrepreneurship and innovation management research, observations are part of the foundation for theory and proposition/hypothesis development. These are just the most obvious benefits of including observation data in a research project.

But what should you observe, when being in a field-setting? That, of course, depends on your research question. Nonetheless, observation data often involves the following:

clearly expressed, self-conscious notations of how observing is done

methodical and tactical improvisation in order to develop a full understanding of the setting of interest

imparting attention in ways that is in some sense 'standardized'

While one may consider digital devices to collect observation data, the most typical form is writing fieldnotes. When browsing the web, you will find numerous examples on how to prepare them, so that they are most helpful when analysing your data later on. One possible way is to consider developing a template to guide your data collection from observations. In particular, templates can be useful when data is collected by inexperienced observers. However, at the same time, templates can deflect attention from unnamed categories, unimagined and unanticipated activities that can be very important to understanding a phenomenon and a setting. Therefore, it is important to be conscious and reflective upon one’s strategy of how to collect observation data.