Activity 1) Generating project ideas and data sources

Activity #1: Generating project ideas and data sources

Overview

  • Type: Meetup with your team during the coaching session
  • Goals
    • identify online data sources and evaluate their value in the context of a specific societal or business problem
    • start the group formation process
  • Deliverable
    • Discussion with coach about data context and potential sources
    • Brief description of data context (and classification into four pathways of knowledge generation) + list of potential data sources for your team project

Preparation before the activity

  • Take a personality test
    • Before meeting, please individually takewill you be the team’s driver, or rather perform important tasks as an analyst?
  • Read the diversity statement below on this page & take it to heart in your team project!
  • Ensure that you have worked through the self-study material of this week before meeting as a team

Session structure

  1. Introduction

    • Introduce yourselves to each other (e.g., what hobbies are you passionate about? what’s your biggest personal (business, study-related) challenge right now? what are the results of your personality test?)
    • Ensure you have enrolled to a project team on Canvas, and meet all requirements (e.g., number of team members). Inform the course coordinator in case of doubts.

  2. Come up with an interesting data context that addresses one (or multiple) of the four central pathways through which web data has advanced marketing thought (see paper for the details and typology).

  3. Start to broadly identify data sources in your particular data context, by working through challenge #1.1-1.2 in the paper and corresponding parts in table 2.

Challenge each other!

The challenges are called “challenges” for a good reason. Putting them into action is really difficult! So please be critical when working on this activity. One way to achieve this is to take turns in suggesting data sources, after which all team members use questions/checks from Table 2 to assess whether the team members has thought deeply enough about a particular data source. Then, move on to the next team member and repeat.

After some time, you will notice that your ideas continue to change substantially.

Diversity & inclusion matters!

While we try to start the conversation about potential topics to work on around specific themes, we ask you not to feel restricted by those. In fact, what really matters here is that you bring in your passion (e.g., hobby), background (e.g., nationality, ethnicity), or any other thing that you consider part of yourself. In other words, let’s bring alive Tilburg’s statement of diversity and inclusion. If you’re really into scraping Amazon.com, that’s fine. But if you’re more interested in that niche platform that you and some of your friends hang out on, feel welcome to do that! We’re not just here to do what others have done in the past, but we’re here to move our field along. And we won’t be able to do that without talking about and doing the things that you truely care about.

Please also check out the syllabus for some more information on how diversity & inclusion matters in this class.