Project Design

 

As the project team wanted to help people learn skills that will help them develop as entrepreneurs in a new country or to take their entrepreneurial skills to a new country in order to improve their business we had to select research methods that can be applied in all four countries taking part in the project.

 

Other important factors in choosing methods were

1)      Accessibility of methods to ELIE participants

2)      Suitability of methods for achieving our aims

We decided that while traditional interviews are a good way of establishing a narrative account of an individual business development there also needed to be more interactive methods that would generate discussion amongst entrepreneurs and students as these were our target groups. We selected workshops as a means of generating discussion and encouraging debates.

 

Our interviews will reveal patterns of entrepreneurship and help us to identify key decision making points and factors that might affect success

 

Our workshops help fill in gaps in knowledge. They let us identify similarities and differences amongst a varied group of businesses. They also provide vital information about the differences between what students think and entrepreneur is and does; and what actually takes place in a small or medium sized enterprise.