The Research Pro-

posal Layout
Research Proposal (A total of 500 words)
The research proposal section is written in the future tense.
Include:
• RQ

• Rationale
◦ How this RQ relates to current company priorities or chal-
lenges.
◦ This is NOT why YOU are interested in this topic, but ra-
ther why the COMPANY has an interest in this question.
For example, the company is currently focused on im-
proving their quality of their products and your IA (and
you show us this using a source) and your IA is related to
increasing quality. This lets us know that your work is ac-
tually valuable.
• Theoretical Framework
◦ Course sections (i.e. chapters), with specific tools listed
and an explanation of how each will help you answer the
RQ.
• Methodology
◦ The sources of primary and secondary information you
will pursue, citing specific names of people you will inter-
view (and why), as well as specific information you will fo-
cus on finding.
◦ Include more than one source of primary data. If you can't
do two interviews, you'll likely want to do something like a
survey or an observation.
• Anticipated Difficulties.
◦ Explain some possible problems you will likely face, the
reasons for these difficulties and how you plan to deal
with them.
◦ Try to go beyond the obvious ones, such as bias and ac-
cess to information.
 ◦ Tell us why some of the information you need could be
hard to get or unreliable.
• Action Plan.
◦ Include dates and also a section where you show modifi-
cations you've made, as you completed your work.
◦ This shows that you actually used your action plan during
your IA. Also, at least one of these modifications should
show that you actually learned something (or realized
something related to business) and that's why you made
the change.
◦ This again shows that you were growing as a result of
your work --which starts to build the case for Criterion I
(Reflective Thinking).
• The word count for the entire proposal.