Background to the Preliminary Research Description (PRD) v2.

You will have an idea about what you want to research before you have even started working at your
internship organisation. As a business researcher (as opposed to an academic researcher), your final
goal is to give your client a set of action points (or recommendations) that will solve their individual
issue. So deep thought is needed now to draft a PRD.

You will need to analyse a complex business problem, then collect and analyse data to provide
solutions to your host company. For the graduation phase, several other requirements, including
external and internal factors, exist.

The PRD helps students to get a head-start with their graduation internship, making the final goals
clearer from the beginning. It also avoids students realising, when it’s too late, that their organisation
does not have a suitable business problem.

Several sections make up the PRD, and this document explains what is expected in each, using
examples to illustrate each point.

The word limit is 1500 words1 for all sections excluding the additional comments. Staying within the
limit requires conciseness, and your thesis will need to be concise too. Too many words at this stage
will simply lead to feedback being limited to “use fewer words”.

Identifying information
An objective set of information about your internship. Some information is needed to assess whether
the organisation qualifies. See handbook for details. Be as brief as possible. Avoid these mistakes:

- Over-listing company supervisor qualifications. Just include degree and total years of
working experience.
- Copy-pasting text from internal documents, LinkedIn etc..
- Over-selling the company’s international credentials. Information is needed on what will
make it an international experience for the student. See handbook.
- Start and end-dates that clash with the time schedule in the handbook.

The tick boxes

These questions are all obligatory. Supplying false information will be considered as fraud.

If you don’t yet qualify because of insufficient credits when starting to draft your PRD, do not select Y
because you think you will qualify at the start. Instead, select N. The qualification will be checked in
your progress report upload in OnStage.

Be realistic about the credits you are likely to gain in the remainder of the semester. If there is any
doubt about you securing enough points, based on your current progress, contact your study coach
for advice. The graduation coordinators know from experience that it is highly unlikely that students
manage to qualify on time if their credit gap is greater than 15 ECs, or if the credit gap is higher than
their average credits gained per term, or if they still need to hand in a resit of their S4 report(s).
Remember that you need to pass the graduation phase plus another 150ECs in order to graduate. If,

1
In addition to text already in the template
by the end of the current semester, you have more than 30ECs to gain, it is likely to take you another
semester or longer to secure those.

Organisation description
Give relevant and objective information about the organisation. Explain terms used and check
whether claims stand up to scrutiny. An example: ‘this company is the leading manufacturer of X with
a market share of Y’. Be critical of organisation’s statements that could be based more on hopes than
facts. Another example: ‘this company has three core values: sustainability, customer value, and staff
happiness’, while selling plastic packages, containing fluids with microplastics, made in factories with
little attention to safety.

Students do not need to sell the organisation. Your introduction is likely to be a base that puts the
possible problem that you will be working on, into context. Avoid listing facts without a logical order
or a readable story.

Daily activities in the organisation

For most students, your graduation internship will not be fully dedicated to doing research, so
describe your daily activities in the company.

Possible practical business problem

This is without doubt the most vital part of the PRD and the whole research project. Every other
element of the project relates to the problem. The student needs to do primary research on factors
that contribute to a complex business problem. The set of recommendations at the end should have
a real impact. Therefore, the student initially needs to explain the complexity of the problem and the
necessity of solving it. A clear and full description of the problem is needed: what is the problem,
why is it a problem, what is the impact of the problem, what would happen if this is not solved, what
solutions have already been tried? etc.

Most common mistakes here are:

- Not focusing on 1 or 2 problems but listing a whole set – don’t be afraid to scope.
- Not defining a problem but defining a solution.
- Not substantiating claims (huge, big, disastrous, need, will, …)
- Not having a real problem, but simply a commercial goal (the organisation would like to …)
- Selecting a ‘problem’ that could be simply solved by reading a book

Some examples:

- Not good: The organisation feels they could sell more items (not a problem, not
substantiated).
- Good: The organisation seems unable to reach X-customers. Although X-customers make up
for 30% of the market, they only make up 1% of the sales volume of the organisation.
- Not good: According to the literature, Covid-19 caused a drop in sales (does not say that this
is a problem for this organisation).
- Good: Covid-19 caused a 40% drop in sales. With the recent opening of borders, sales were
expected to go back up, however, they did not, while direct competitors did revert to
previous levels.
- Not good: Nobody in the company knows how to work with XYZ computer software.
Link between daily activities and your research topic
Highlight any relationship between your day to day tasks and your research interest. Remember,
working in an area that you are also researching will allow far more opportunities for observation
and discussion.

Macro-economic developments
No organisation operates in a vacuum, and students are expected to identify and take into
consideration those macro-economic factors that have most potential to impact the organisation.
These might include social, economic, technological, trust, political, legal, or other trends.

In your thesis, an outside view is expected. What is happening in the world around the organisation
that affects the problem, the recommendations, or both? For instance, if a producer of cars notices a
decline in petrol-driven car sales in Europe, there is probably a European development linked to it.
Relocation services will be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Producers of equipment to work from
home will be as well.

Common mistakes in this section are:

- Naming without explaining.

- Relating it to the company instead of the problem.
- Completely missing the link.

Strategic cycles
Whether formal or informal, strategic cycles are very often part of the fabric of an organisation’s
operations. They provide a framework for regular tasks in a department or team. Understanding the
processes that your client currently goes through, and the impact that your recommendations will
have on these processes, needs to be considered. Be aware that your ideas could either enhance or
upset established cycles in the organisation.

Therefore, later on, students are expected to look at ways that the problem area relates to the way
the organisation runs its activities, both currently and once the recommendations have been made.
For example, when an organisation does not have an after-sales process, a recommendation to call
customers three weeks after a sale is rather awkward. This needs to be preceded by a
recommendation to upgrade the sales cycle. Another example: if an organisation has an elaborate
PDCA cycle in marketing, planning a few months ahead, this is a challenge for using influencer
marketing. Strategic cycles could help or harm the effects of your recommendation and could
influence the severity of the problem.

For the PRD, it is sufficient to identify the strategic cycles that currently exist and relate to the
problem area.

Common mistakes in this section are:

- Naming without explaining.

- Focusing on the cycle instead of the problem.
- Providing too much minute detail about the cycle.
- Providing a theoretical cycle from literature, rather than an actual cycle from your client.

Research questions
Although they follow on from the problem analysis and factors in both the organisation and
environment, the research questions could be seen as a litmus test to see whether the student is
ready to start their graduation research project. The main research question (RQ) leads to executable
action points, so it makes sense to use the verb "should" in the question. It must also have some
SMART elements, being Specific, Measurable & Time-bound. Where appropriate, Relevant and
Achievable are nice to have. The SMART elements can help illustrate the impact of your work, and
will help you to gain support and cooperation from your manager and colleagues.

The Sub-questions (SQ) need to be derived from a review of what experts say about the specific
problem area experienced by similar organisations. For the PRD, and without pre-judging, think
about factors that may be key to solving the problem, and describe some likely sub-questions that
can test this causal link.

Common mistakes in this section are:

- Dumping a load of questions.

- Unspecific main research question.
- Abstract question.
- Not related to the problem specified.
- Closed questions that can be answered with a yes or a no (or True/False).
- Questions that do not require primary research.
- Questions that are too academic or general, rather than specific to your client

Some examples:

- Not good: Which markets should be targeted for major expansion? Not specific, not
timebound (not a real problem).
- Good: What steps will be needed in the coming two years to optimise the market share
among X-customers?
- Not good: How to improve the market share in the coming two years? Not specific.

Per sub-question
Describe your intended research set-up.

Include choices of primary data collection method for each sub-question. Ensure that you are
selecting the most reliable and credible methods. It’s likely that you’ll use multiple methods, and
possibly a mix from the qualitative and quantitative categories. You might find it helpful to
triangulate, i.e. look at an issue from 2 different perspectives.

Which groups of actors are you interested in researching for each sub-question? Describe these
populations. Then determine how you will select suitable samples, where needed, to represent the
populations of interest.

Provide details about the size of each data collection exercise. For a survey, how many respondents?
For interviews, how many interviewees? How large will any experiments, focus groups or
observations be?

Where necessary, use Davies and Hughes for a reminder of the choices available.

Additional information
This box is for students to give additional and concise information they think is suitable. Do not add
links to more information here – they will not be clicked.