intro to business

FINAL PAPER FOR “INTRO TO BUSINESS”

You
have learned (or will learn about) a lot of really interesting topics in “Intro
to Business” this semester. To heighten
this impact, you will be doing a final paper on one of the following two
topics. In both cases, there are elements
from throughout the semester that will help you make it happen.

What you’ll be doing (written):

Due no later than May 6, you will be writing a 7-page
(minimum) paper based on:

Option #1—Owning Your Own Business

Establish what your business will
do and explain what the reasoning is as to why you can be successful (you
will probably need to do some industry research here)
What type of business
ownership? Explain why you chose
this form over others
Would you use an incubator or other
startup tools? Explain your selection.
Consider small business failures;
what would you do to safeguard against some of these?
How would you secure
financing?
How would you measure success?
How would you market your business?
How would you incorporate the key
facets of management into your venture ethically?

For
the remaining part of your paper, you should be detailing facts about the
business and discussing methodology you have learned from the entire semester.

Option #2—Fixing An Existing Business

Imagine you are a consulting team working to
turn around an existing business:

·
What’s
wrong with this company? Look at the
financials and read the news
·
Tie
the need for change into strategy. Perhaps
you need to start over with strategy. Maybe
a SWOT would work here. Possibly benchmark
another company if appropriate or use best practices. This could come structurally or culturally.
What type of financing would be
necessary to bring about change?
How would you facilitate this type of change?
How would you measure success?
How would you market the changes to
your business?
How would you incorporate the key
facets of management into your venture and do so ethically?

Of
course, you won’t have all the details needed to fix a business as you won’t
know certain details but set your mind free and think creatively before writing
this paper. Once you’ve done that, you
should go about tying your thoughts into concepts discussed throughout the semester
and explained during class. The best
papers will be realistic. While the
temptation is to try to fix a bankrupt retailer, something that large and
troubled might not be able to be fixed by mere mortals.

With Either Paper…

You should write the paper in a standard format and use
footnotes/endnotes when needed. This is
your biggest paper of the semester by far!

The paper is due NO LATER than May 6.
Remember, this is the end of the semester, so late papers may not make
it in before grades are submitted.

I normally require an oral presentation, but it can’t be done in this
format. Instead, all students have the
option to get extra credit by creating a video of 3-5 minutes relative to the
topic. Students taking this option can
also drop the page requirement from 7 to 5 pages, BUT it cannot be just you
talking to the camera. You have to do
something creative, which drives home the central point of your paper. What that happens to be is up to you.

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