business

business

By Data and by Design

By Data and by Design

, , Contests, Matt Dilworth
The greatest business idea will struggle to find success without good marketing and design.  The converse is also true; no amount of pretty packaging will make a bad product better.  Over the last eight years, the IU East Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) has offered an incredible product – the East-Central Indiana Business Survey.  This survey draws data from experienced local businesses – over 100 of them – in Wayne, Fayette, Franklin, Henry, Randolph, Rush, and Union counties.  From this data, the local confidence in business prospects is measured, looking at factors like workforce size, capital investment, and profitability in addition to optimism or pessimism in the future.  This data in turn improves the community’s understanding of the local … Continued
Raiding the Corporate Info

Raiding the Corporate Info

, , Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
When thinking about research, we often think about searching for discrete, published items – books, journal articles, videos.  But some information is quite different, and some is fluid and ever-changing.  One area where this is the case is corporate research, whether examining a specific company or looking into a whole sector of the national or global economy.  As businesses change and adapt and merge and re-strategize, the information about them fluctuates constantly, and researchers of any kind – investors, academics, etc. – need tools which keep up with the changes. For an individual company, stock prices, corporate strategies, and financials are likely to be major points of interest.  Mergent Online or Hoover’s Company Records are solid databases for this – search by … Continued
Business Questions

Business Questions

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
Last week, we looked at basic research.  But there are specialized tools for each academic discipline at IU East.  And while the basic searching techniques work in most databases, if you’re majoring in business and economics, you’ll want to use economics-oriented databases.  Fortunately, there are plenty of great sources for business news and research articles, like Business Source Premier or ABI/Inform (all of our business databases can be found here). So, using what we learned last week, if we had an economic question like “how is Obamacare expected to impact middle-income Americans?”  We would start with a database like Business Source Premier. We might use a search like: (obamacare OR affordable care act OR health care reform) AND (effect OR … Continued
Business Insights: Essentials

Business Insights: Essentials

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth
Last week we looked at a database that was adding new content, but sometimes our databases completely reinvent themselves.  Such is the case with Business Insights: Essentials, a database from the Gale Corporation. Formerly called Business and Company Resource Center, Gale fully reengineered the search interface, making it much cleaner and easier to use.  You can search by topic, industry type, company name, or ticker symbol, and it will recognize your syntax and return the appropriate information.  So, if you type in ‘environmentalism’, you’ll get articles about green companies and initiatives.  If you type ‘msft’, you’ll get corporate information about Microsoft.  If you type ‘consumer electronics’, you’ll get related industry profiles, and links to companies that manufacture them.  You don’t … Continued