I have finished all of my research! After reading and annotating 15 sources I am now done with all the research and have gathered all the information needed to accurately evaluate businesses in my study. Now it is time to go out into the community to get businesses to join my study and fill out my survey. These next few weeks will consist of gathering information and while I am doing that there will be very little to do at school. Because of that I am going to begin to set up a baseline for what qualifies a business as successful in a very broad sense. With that it will be easier to evaluate the results I get.
The last two weeks I have spent hours researching what it is that makes a successful business. I have been looking at everything from 30 page Restaurant Industry Reports to websites with helpful tips like Entrepreneur.com. From the 15 sources I have looked at so far I have gotten a bunch of great information. My findings include things like, five employees all businesses should have, how to make a good marketing strategy, what makes a good leader, what the state of the business owner is, how the food industry is growing, the technology a business need to prepare for the future, and many other great bits of information. All this information I have put into two different surveys, one for the owners and one for the employees. Something I decided to do with the surveys is that I am going to ask both the owners and employees similar questions to see if they are all on the same page or if the owners are thinking they are doing one thing, but their employees feel totally different. This research aspect has been incredibly helpful to me because I feel like I am now close to ready to begin evaluating businesses on my own.
On Tuesday the 30th our class and the Global Studies class all met to discuss our topics in the form of speed dating. We had four minutes with another person to discuss and formulate new ideas of our topics. I found the exercise really productive because it both raised an interest in my project and gave me new ideas to try to incorporate into my work. My peers had some excellent suggestions for me, some of their ideas included, look at the demand for a business' product, look at how location affects the business, and then do the businesses even offer a quality product. All of those ideas are things I might try to include while I am conducting my research. Along with getting great suggestions I was also able to get a few people to volunteer their families small businesses which was a great bonus. Not only did I get great ideas I think I was able to give some good feedback to my peers which they could use to better their work. The speed dating exercise was a great way to have some other people look at my ideas and for me to check out what other people are doing. The next time we do it we will have solidified our projects so it will be great to see what people say about what we have done.
Today I researched my last idea and watched a video on the future of the economics and technology of small businesses. From the videos I watched I found that most small businesses plan to adapt to the new business future through technology and a streamlined competitive pricing plan. Businesses will have to specialize deals that focus on certain demographics. Lastly there will need to be an increased focus on personal service because eventually prices will all be so similar the sale is going to go to whoever makes the customer feel best. These are all things that we I can put into my questions for the businesses of Rutland.
I have been watching videos today on the psychology of employees and what makes an employee productive and happy. I found a video called The Social Context of Work Environments, it talks about the Hawthorne Effect, a study conducted in Hawthorne, Illinois that found that when a participant in a behavioral study knows they are being observed they will change their behavior. This effect was then applied to the business world and it was found that employees are more likely to be productive when their managers and co-workers are interested and attentive of their employees and co-workers. I think I am going to begin polling the psychological states of several employees at several businesses around Rutland. I will begin working on that questionnaire today.
Today I watched several videos on how young businessmen connect. This came from my first idea of the interconnectivity of entrepreneurs looking to connect. I saw several videos from websites and other forums that try to connect businessmen. From what I saw these sites, like SYG Small Young Business Group, try to connect businesses to investors, and other financiers to make the business run. I am still not finding a lot of good information that I can work with or relate to STEM in this idea. I am still trying to gather information on my other idea which I think I will have a lot more success working with.
I resumed my search for a topic of research today. I began with looking into studies conducted on small businesses across the country to see what made them successful. I found that there are a lot different aspects to making a small business successful. I think I am going to run with this idea, I will poll as many local small businesses as I can to see what they have done to become successful or unsuccessful. I will tie this into STEM by using the psychology of employees (science), the financial situation of the company (math), and then finally building a project to show what it is that makes small businesses successful (engineering). I think my project will be interesting to a lot of people who are looking to start their own business in our area.
Another idea that I will be looking into is what the future holds for these successful companies and what they plan to do to keep their company relevant and running. From the information I have gathered some major things that I will need to look into is, how active the business owner is in his own business, how the employees feel they are treated by their boss, how well the business model is planned, what the company does to promote itself, has the company ever faced hard times, the influence of technology on the business, the pay and financial situation of that business, and many more things that I will be finding out as my research expands. I am very excited about this project and look forward to conducting it. Today was a day for thinking about what my STEM capstone would be about. It took me awhile to come up with my first of three prospective ideas, but after thinking for awhile an idea that I thought would be really cool came to me. That idea was an app, an app that could be used for prospective small businessmen to connect with each other about their startups and to connect with possible investors. I researched several sites, mostly sites on how to create apps and then several ones about how entrepreneurs connect with one another. After about an hour of researching these sites I realized that currently there are about nine websites, that have a strong flow of traffic, that are used primarily to connect prospective businesses. I also found that designing an app takes a lot of skill and training that I would not have been able to learn in the amount of time we had. Despite the outcomes of this research I still have an interest in doing something related to business for my STEM project. I am also wondering, because of this research, how well do small businesses develop and what key things lead to businesses succeeding or failing. Maybe I will research that next, so todays research was definitely not a waste of time.
9/17/14 Hey, welcome to my cribMy name is Stephen Anderson, I am a senior at Rutland High School in Rutland, VT. I am a student in my school's inaugural STEM Capstone class. The class sends out myself and my classmates into the world to find a problem and try to solve it using Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. All of the students in the class have been required to open up blogs to share our progress. This blog is going to document my progress and research on my 2014 STEM Capstone project. I hope you will find this blog educational, fun and maybe even earth shattering.
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