Business cases are enhanced by bringing outside research.  This can involve applying a diverse range of business publications from company profiles, market research, and scholarly research but almost always current news.  

The list of sources on this page are selected because they should be illuminating for the assigned cases in this course.  This is not an exhaustive list.  

Research Suggestions:

  • Scan multiple company profiles about your client.  Be sure to drill down to analysts reports, news, and conference call transcripts.
  • Explore competitor company profiles.
  • Read industry and market research reports to identify trends and KPIs.
  • Search the news to learn about new developments.
  • Search the scholarly literature to learn about potential solutions to business challenges.
  •  

company profiles

 

  D&B Hoovers
Offers public and private company and industry information including company profiles, market research reports from Marketline, Freedonia, Euromonitor, and RMA updated with recent news, executive profiles, and analyst reports.

  CrunchBase
Great source of information on start-ups, including founders, products, competitors and funding.

  Morningstar Investing Center
Contains information on more than 30,000 stocks, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds. Provides independent analysis, industry information, stock charts, portfolio building tools, and web-based educational tutorials.

  NetAdvantage (Standard & Poor's Capital IQ)
Offers market information, company quotes, equity index information, industry information (including the S&P Industry Surveys), and economic data.

  Pitchbook  Limitations on Use  Access Instructions
Provides data on companies, deals and investors in the private equity and venture capital space.

market research

  Gartner  Limitations on Use
Features analyses, forecasts, and market statistics on IT products and services.
Subscription courtesy of Villanova UNIT.

  Passport (Euromonitor International)  Limitations on Use
Provides lifestyle statistics and reports, market data and analysis, and market forecasts for selected countries. Includes 6-year historic market size data for selected consumer products plus 5-year forecasts.

  eMarketer
Has some coverage of FinTech, streaming services, and payment services.

  Mintel Insights & Analytics  Limitations on Use
Retail and apparel reports and insights

  MarketResearch.com Academic  Limitations on Use
Provides marketing reports for many industries and demographic reports on a variety of age groups. Documents are formatted as Adobe Acrobat or PowerPoint files.

  Statista
Provides a portal to statistics and studies gathered by market researchers, trade organizations, scientific publications, and government sources. Topics covered include industries, media, companies, product categories, and countries.

scholarly Research

 

  ABI/INFORM Collection (ProQuest)
Provides access to scholarly journals, dissertations, working papers, key business and economics periodicals, and country- and industry-focused reports.

  Business Source Premier (EBSCO)
Provides access to a wide range of academic business journals and trade magazines. Topics include management, marketing, finance, economics, and management information systems. Full text access may be embargoed for up to three years. Coverage goes back to 1965.

  Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Scholar search tips

  Scopus (Elsevier)
Provides citations and abstracts to peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings in all major disciplines. Provides information on citing and cited references for each article.

  Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford University Press)  Tutorial
Presents peer-reviewed, annotated bibliographies and expert commentary on current scholarship in selected disciplines. Villanova University has access to the following bibliographies: African American Studies, Art History, Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, British and Irish Literature, Buddhism, Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Communication, Criminology, Environmental Science, Geography, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Latin American Studies, Management, Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Renaissance and Reformation, and Victorian Literature.

news

In addition to the databases listed here, use the Bloomberg terminals in the Gmelich Finance Lab and Falvey Library.

 

  ABI/INFORM Collection (ProQuest)

  Business Source Premier (EBSCO)

  Factiva (Dow Jones)
Provides access to international, national and local news sources. Many different news media such as newspapers, magazines, wires, blogs and transcripts are aggregated in English and foreign languages. The content is current and archival. Industry, company and market profiles are also provided.

  Nexis Uni  Limitations on Use

  Financial Times  Limitations on Use  Access Instructions

  TechCrunch
Offers reporting on the tech industry

  Listen Notes
Podcast episode search engine