IB Business & Management.

The Coursework Research Question – The Importance of ‘Focus’.

One of the first things that you will have to do when starting your business coursework is to choose a good, well focused research question (r.q.) . If you choose an inappropriate or unfocused r.q., you will be handicapped from the beginning. The word count for the HL coursework is only 2000 words (excluding the Research Question and Research Proposal) and for SL it is only 1500 ( for more general  information on the business coursework see this page of my blog). These word counts are short, and for this reason your r.q. must not be too broad. You need to focus on one specific business (or industry) in one country, and analyse one (or possibly two) of it’s problems,  strategies or decisions. See the diagram below:-

The above diagram illustrates some possible research questions, and their levels of focus, from unfocused at the top to much more focused on the bottom.

As you can see from the r.q. at the bottom, it looks at just one company, in one country, focusing on just one strategy. Indeed, rather than looking at just the ‘marketing strategy ( which potentially is a very broad strategy that includes a number of things such as ‘pricing’, ‘promotion’, ‘product’ and ‘place’, see the r.q. second from bottom ) it just focuses on just one of these – promotion.

Keep following this blog for more posts  on the IB Business coursework.