ENT 5113: Entrepreneurship (Chawla)

From a user's perspective, the main difference between a library database and a website is access. 

• Library databases are available to users affiliated with UTSA, such as currently registered students, faculty, and staff through the library website. Most UTSA databases are available remotely with your abc123 login.  Visitors can use most databases, but only onsite on library guest computers.  
• Websites (or certain sections of websites ) are accessible at any time to anyone and may be found through a web search. Some websites host open access databases which are available for free. Many kinds of websites are very important in business research, for example, government websites (SEC.gov, census.gov, etc.), company's investor pages, open access resources, news, some commercial sites, and many more. 

Conducting research for a business plan for a mobile app is different from a business with defined geographic reach and in more traditional industries.  Here are suggested keywords to find relevant information and examples:

Try these search tips:

• When researching this topic, keep track of keywords that are used in relevant documents when reviewing results.
• When searching specific sites, such as SAM.gov, use truncation * to allow for variants of these words. When using search engines, such as Google, you don't need to use truncation. It automatically expands to include variants of the words. 
  • immigra* OR refuge* OR migra* OR alien*
• If your focus is on unauthorized immigration, these keywords may help:
  • undocumented OR unauthorized OR illegal
• These keywords will help narrow down your results:
  • assistance OR program OR service
• Use operator "site" to locate local service for immigrants on the City of San Antonio website:
  • immigrant site:sanantonio.gov

MaRS Discovery in Canada offers a robust suite of resources to tech entrepreneurs which also prove useful for building up market research skills. Review the webpage and take this quick course below.

Industry Research

Market Research

Mapping

Articles