This module aims to increase your awareness and understanding of the issues and challenges of starting up and operating a small business and being entrepreneurial. As entrepreneurship requires a strong focus on practice, this will be achieved by providing you with a practical insight into setting up and trading as a small business, raising awareness of self-employment as a viable career option. You will learn about entrepreneurship as a process, the entrepreneurial person, ideation, and opportunity recognition, pitching and presenting, business planning, idea validation, resource acquisition, market analysis, customers and selling, entrepreneurial marketing, networking, and accelerators, incubation, and support. You will learn how to identify, explore, and progress your own business idea and be supported in your experience of planning this idea over the course of the module, recognising patterns and opportunities in complex situations and environments. At the end of this module, you will have a deeper understanding of real-life entrepreneurial issues and how they can be addressed. The development of entrepreneurial awareness, capability and mind-set which the module seeks to promote lends itself to application not only in new venture creation or development but also within traditional employment contexts.

This module uses entrepreneurship and innovation challenges to develop your professional mindset, capabilities and attributes. Each challenge will involve you working in teams to achieve specified aims and will focus around contemporary real world socio-economic problems identified in the local community, internationally and within the business community. During the module you will analyse your entrepreneurial mindset and capabilities and develop key skills around entrepreneurial learning. You will build on this understanding of your entrepreneurial self to one where you can assemble and work with teams to complete entrepreneurship and innovation challenges.

You will be involved in 4 challenges and be supported through lectures and seminars that will deliver relevant theory and practice on: entrepreneurial mindset and capabilities; how to work effectively within dynamic teams; how to adopt a design-ethos in problem solving; and in how to lead entrepreneurially. During the process you will use your understanding of your entrepreneurial self to enhance your skills profile in relation to the global graduate market.

This module offers an opportunity to develop an understanding of and interest in contemporary issues in entrepreneurship.

The word “entrepreneurship” has evolved over recent years and the term now covers a diverse range of social and economic actors, processes and situations. Entrepreneurship as an academic domain has exploded in diverse ways. This module aims to introduce you to some of the key themes of contemporary entrepreneurship research. The content will be flexible in order to showcase the current, leading-edge research interests of faculty and will have three broad themes:

Entrepreneurial performance and growth: Consideration of the links between economic and entrepreneurial performance, and lessons for growth, prosperity, economic policy and job creation. Possible topics will include creative/rural industries entrepreneurship, small business creation and development,innovation, incubation and networks, supporting small business, and SME finance and venture capital.

Entrepreneurial actors: Consideration of the person of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurial behaviours as well as socioeconomic dimensions such as labour markets, demography and entrepreneurial heterogeneity. Possible topics will include gender, entrepreneurship, social, community and ethnic entrepreneurship, management and leadership skills development and growth issues.

Entrepreneurial frameworks: Consideration of entrepreneurship theoretical frameworks and the ethics of entreprenership, as well as the impact of culture (organisational, regional, national and international) including entrepreneurship education and training. Possible topics will include entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurship education, sustainability and environmental issues, and entrepreneurial philanthropy.

On completion of the module you will be able to demonstrate critical thinking skills and oral & written communication skills.

In this module you will learn about a comprehensive range of research methods and business analytics techniques. This will equip you with the knowledge and practical skills necessary for you to conduct research at Masters’ level and prepare you to complete a Master’s Dissertation, Consultancy Project or Management Enquiry. By the end of the module you will know how to apply both quantitative and qualitative data collection and business analysis techniques. In quantitative techniques you will learn about sampling, questionnaire design, statistical inference, and hypothesis testing while qualitative techniques covered will include methods such as interviewing and focus groups. Analysis methods such as content analysis and thematic analysis will also be covered. In addition, you will gain some understanding of research philosophy (positivism and interpretivism) and research ethics and you will be able to write a research proposal to bring these ideas together.

Furthermore, this module will provide clear, critical, and analysis of data, you will also be able to consider the use of analytics implementation skills, where you will be introduced to analytics software such as SPSS. SPSS statistics analysis is one of the powerful solutions that is designed to help businesses and researchers to solve problems by various methods (geospatial analysis, predictive analytics and hypothesis testing).