Day 6 — Busy day

Mondays are busy days now. In the morning I’m working in the “field” with the cooperation of companies, which I set up during the autumn. Afternoon I continue at the university, where I participate in Theory Building and Research Design in Strategy and Venturing course.

I must say that the last assignment for the calls was the most challenging so far. I had to develop a robust proposition or hypothesis for my research proposal. Somehow, it felt that this is not that hard for a variance type of study, but I’m still targeting to do a process study. How do you develop a good proposition for a variance study?

First, what is a proposition? It is a statement at higher level of abstraction, which proposes causality relationship between at least two constructs. In a variance study, “x causes y” is fairly straightforward. However, in a process study should I say “first x, then y”? Overall, propositions are not directly testable (that’s why they are at higher level of abstraction). To move to testing a hypothesis must be developed. Hypothesis is similar, but it includes specific measures (which should represent the phenomenon or constructs as accurately as possible or as needed). These measures are used to test validity (reject or not reject) of the hypothesis.

In my case, the proposition ended up being a long list of ingredients that should be included in the process for it to be successful (I’m looking at business model innovation). Since I expect that the process is not just a sequence (lifecycle), but rather a collection of necessary items which are not sequential (teleology), this seemed the right approach.

The result, it seems that this is too broad. The feedback is that I could drill deeper to some of the propositions. But isn’t it pointing me back to a variance study, which I tried to avoid?

Besides, individual propositions are not as groundbreaking and, in fact, have been directly or indirectly discussed in the literature before. So recognition of their presence (alone) is not really a contribution. Of course, I could look for moderators around an individual proposition or identify specific angle, but I’m not sure if I want to go there.

Alternatively, I can also identify a new relevant question, which will be relevant to the overall process.

I don’t know yet. But this was a good challenge.

Also, I experimented with a structure where I open with a quote and close by circling back to the idea from the quote. I think it was a nice composition, but the main body of the text was a bit more dull.

This is a work in progress.