BA (Hons) Business and Entrepreneurship

The Management Enquiry module is a student-led individual project that enables you to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module. The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate an authentic engagement with managers and/or professionals in your discipline, and to integrate the knowledge you have developed during your programme to explore the theory in practice. The learning on this module is experiential and problem based, where the focus is upon you discovering, probing and questioning key practice-based issues. Through the module you will be offered the opportunity to develop and enhance key transferable employability skills including; time management, project management, communication (written, aural and verbal), negotiation, persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative, problem-solving and analysis.

The module has five thematic areas; explore, review, engage, reflect and connect. These form the key elements of the assessed submission.

Part A (35%, 3,500 Words)
• Explore: Interviewing a manager and/or professional in your discipline. In this interview you will either explore a key issue which you feel the discipline is facing or, alternatively, explore with the manager or professional the key issues that they feel they are facing in practice. It is expected that you will apply appropriate interview methods and provide evidence of the interview within the submitted enquiry report (e.g. within the appendices).
• Review: Critically examining the appropriate literature to support the exploration, displaying an ability to critically assess and appraise the knowledge of your discipline related to a specific key issue arising from your exploration.

Part B (65%, 6,500 Words)
• Engage: Displaying an authentic engagement with the discipline problem/issue identified in Part A, by collecting/generating and analysing further live data (beyond the initial interview) regarding the discipline problem/issue. This live data may be primary data (e.g. further interviews with, or questionnaire to, managers and/or professionals in practice) or secondary data (e.g. industry data). Application of appropriate, ethically-considered, research methods and appropriate qualitative or quantitative data analysis.
• Reflect and Connect: Demonstrating an ability to critically evaluate and reflect on the issues arising from the Management Enquiry. Demonstrating how you have connected and fed-back to the participants of the Enquiry (usually the manager and/or participants) your key findings to provide clear prioritised, well-justified, practical and actionable recommendations for change/enhancement/improvement to existing practice to show how the recommendations would potentially affect workplace professional decision making.

The dissertation module aims to equip you with the necessary intellectual and practical skills for undertaking an individual student-led, ethical investigation into an applied business (or the named degree) problem or issue. In addition, the dissertation aims to equip you with key transferable, employability skills, including: time management, project management, communication (written and verbal), negotiation, persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative, creativity and innovation in problem-solving, analysis.

The module is student-led but you are supported by, initially, weekly lectures and seminar-workshops which provide an introduction to undertaking Business-Management research followed by one-to-one or small-group supervision meetings.
The lectures and seminar-workshops will cover the following topics:
1. Developing a research aim/question (focusing and scoping the research)
2. Developing a literature review
3. Writing a research proposal
4. Researching ethically
5. Quantitative research techniques
6. Qualitative research techniques
7. Quantitative analysis techniques
8. Qualitative analysis techniques

Upon completion of the module you will be able to:
1. Conduct independent and ethical academic research involving the application and critical evaluation of appropriate theories and models,
2. Engage critically with relevant literature to establish a framework in which to analyse and synthesise the results of your primary or secondary research
3. Generate / collect relevant primary or secondary data using an appropriate and justified method
4. Analyse your data using an appropriate and justified method of analysis
5. Recognise the ethical implications of your work
6. Critically evaluate the source of your data and the method you adopted

The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to integrate the knowledge acquired during the programme and apply this to a consultancy project for a real organisation. This consultancy project provides a vehicle for participants to develop and demonstrate key employability skills, to relate theory to practice, and to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module.

You will work on behalf of an external organisation, which has identified a business problem or question, requiring a solution, working in small group of typically 4 individuals (you will select their own team members), participating in group and individual activities. The host organisation will provide a project briefing, and review; students will be supported by appropriate academic input and guidance from Newcastle Business School in the form of a mentor and via the Business Clinic.

This module aims to provide you with the knowledge and skills to understand the start-up and development of companies operating within digital markets. The module is delivered through lectures and seminars.

The module will cover the following issues:

• The growth and scope of e-commerce
• Business models for digital enterprises
• Digital platforms
• Management within digital markets
• Competition within digital markets
• Public policy and regulatory implications

Through this module you will gain skills enabling you to analyse the growth and developing of digital entrepreneurial activities. On completing the module, you will understand how companies grow and appreciate the dynamic and complex nature of the relationship between the digital enterprise and its wider context.

This module focuses on the external context for entrepreneurial businesses and the design and implementation of public policy to stimulate levels of entrepreneurship. You will therefore learn how entrepreneurial success at the level of a country or region can be shaped by the external environment and how governments are seeking to encourage and support entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial ecosystem is ‘a set of interconnected entrepreneurial actors (both potential and existing), entrepreneurial organisations, institutions and entrepreneurial processes which formally and informally coalesce to connect, mediate and govern the performance within the local entrepreneurial environment’ (Mason and Brown, 2014). You will explore the nature of these elements and their combination in different contexts as a means to understand the differences in levels of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour in different places. Examples will be provided of successful and less developed locations, and the local policy responses.

Specific topics will include:
Definitions and elements in entrepreneurial ecosystems
The role of institutions such as universities, finance capital etc
Measuring entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship policies
Entrepreneurship in metropolitan contexts
High tech enterprise and university spin offs
Rural enterprise
Entrepreneurship policy in developing countries

This module will introduce students to all aspects of family business studies. It will cover seminal issues including the evolution of family businesses and differing interpretations of family business including the distinction between family and non-family business. The role of family businesses worldwide and how they operate in different socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts. Drivers of longevity in family business including succession planning/management, next-generation engagement, innovation, transgenerational issues (such as transmission of skills), change management and entrepreneurship. Finally, there will be special focus areas such as: emotions in family business (including socioemotional wealth); values in family business (including governance and CSR); family business strategy and competitive advantage (including Resource-Based View); and the function family business history (including identity creation/maintenance, branding and impression management).

You will develop an understanding of moral philosophy and be able to apply these intellectual frameworks in the context of various contemporary issues in international business. In doing so, you will be able to identify the taken for granted assumptions and logics which shape practices in international business and critically evaluate their veracity. This will enable you to better apply you own independent critical thought in situations where conflicts arise and therefore require a degree of negotiation, for example in issues such as executive pay, philanthropy, workplace rights, climate change, privacy or modern slavery.

Whether developing organisational policy, representing the organisation in the media or making agreements with a range of multinational organisational stakeholders, you will be required to anticipate and plan for objections and to identify weaknesses and contradictions in your own arguments, thereby enabling you to better manage ethical conflict at work. .

This module offers an opportunity to develop an understanding of and interest in contemporary issues in entrepreneurship.

The word “entrepreneurship” has evolved over recent years and the term now covers a diverse range of social and economic actors, processes and situations. Entrepreneurship as an academic domain has exploded in diverse ways. This module aims to introduce you to some of the key themes of contemporary entrepreneurship research. The content will be flexible in order to showcase the current, leading-edge research interests of faculty and will have three broad themes:

Entrepreneurial performance and growth: Consideration of the links between economic and entrepreneurial performance, and lessons for growth, prosperity, economic policy and job creation. Possible topics will include creative/rural industries entrepreneurship, small business creation and development, innovation, incubation and networks, supporting small business, and SME finance and venture capital.
Entrepreneurial actors: Consideration of the person of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurial behaviours as well as socioeconomic dimensions such as labour markets, demography and entrepreneurial heterogeneity. Possible topics will include gender, entrepreneurship, social, community and ethnic entrepreneurship, management and leadership skills development and growth issues.
Entrepreneurial frameworks: Consideration of entrepreneurship theoretical frameworks and the ethics of entrepreneurship, as well as the impact of culture (organisational, regional, national and international) including entrepreneurship education and training. Possible topics will include entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurship education, sustainability and environmental issues, and entrepreneurial philanthropy.

On completion of the module, you will be able to demonstrate critical thinking skills and oral & written communication skills.

This module brings together all your entrepreneurial learning to support your future plans. The module will support you to understanding your own entrepreneurial effectiveness by how you have lead a venture or taken a leadership role in enterprising activities. You and your peers will work on understanding your own entrepreneurial effectiveness by integrating learning from your time on the programme and thinking about your future plans and thus a focus on how you, your venture or your enterprising activities need to develop before you graduate to support your future career. If you have decided to take a more enterprising career again you will focus on understanding how you need to develop your leadership capabilities for graduate success. You will do this by continuing to work in your coaching team and being supported by a Team Coach.

You will take a leadership role in the all programme events and supports on the programme to develop their entrepreneurial learning.

This module is self-directed so you and your peers will direct your own learning in coaching sessions with support from your team Coach however some of the topics you may cover are;

Sustaining a venture (From Digital Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial eco-systems and Policy
Securing finance for business growth
Running an ethically and socially responsible business
Hiring and employing staff
Professionalising your business
Legal and financial issues of sustaining a business
Options of closing a business

There are several activities which you will take part in across the year, some will be other cohorts on the programme

Bootcamp
Student led enterprise events