Researching business plans and projects – District 3 & eMBA version
When researching or launching a new business, information about industries, markets or competitors can be invaluable. In this session, we will cover resources from the Internet as well as licensed market and industry intelligence databases available from Concordia University Library. This is a workshop adapted from the “Entrepreneurship” course at the John Molson School of Business.
Learning objectiveS
- Locate industry and market reports from the Internet and the Library
- Understand how to use datasets from Statistics Canada (Census & Cansim) and other national agencies
- Develop a healthy information diet
Course Outline
1. Know your industry: reports from IBIS Wrold; SME Benchmarking; Mergent Intellect
2. Using Google for business research: trade associations & governments
3. Statistics Canada for entrepreneurs: Census & CANSIM
4. Reading up on your idea & staying up to date with articles
Course content
0. Where does information come from?
1. Know your industry – look up industry codes (NAICS)
- IBIS World (industry reports)
- Industry reports for Canada, USA, China and Global, filed by NAICS Code.
- Library subscription, expensive reports provided for free by Concordia
- Direct link to the video for this step
- SME Benchmarking (financial statements and ratios)
- Average income statements and financials for Canadian small & medium businesses, by industry (NAICS)
- Free web data provided by Canadian government
- Direct link to the video for this step
- Mergent Intellect (lists of companies)
- Also called Dun&Braadstreet
- Library subscription, expensive reports provided for free by Concordia
- Find competitors, clients, suppliers, market leaders
2. Using Google for business research (governments & trade associations)
- Find trade associations with Google
- They post a lot of industry/market information on their websites
- Trade shows, reports, analysis, press releases, lawsuits, white papers, directories, interviews, newsletters… is there a bias?
- Watch the video for this step
- Find government information with Google’s advanced search
- Most government websites follow a standardized format for their addresses
- Governments study and regulate many topics relevant for new business
- Example: 2017 Communications Monitoring Report from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
| Government Level | Example of “Site/domain” | Tip |
| Municipal | .ville.montreal.qc.ca | Look for “Montréal en statistiques” page for information for boroughs |
| Provincial | .gouv.qc.ca | The province deals with mainly: health, education, welfare, culture, agriculture/food… |
| “Federal” | .gc.ca
.gov europa.eu |
Always check for reports from Industry Canada at site:.ic.gc.ca |
| International | un.org
or other agency |
Agencies affiliated with the United Nations have their own website |
3. Statistics Canada for entrepreneurs
- Statistic Canada – NOT IN GOOGLE
- 2016 Census
- Census Profile: makup of a “place” in Canada
- Data tables: Counts of Canadians by demographic variables
- CANSIM
- All other data tables available from StatCan
- Some useful searches: household spending; retail trade sales; labour force survey; Neighbourhood income and demographics; family income; NAICS Statistics
- Click on “Add/remouve data” when looking at a data table to toggle data dimensions
- Watch the YouTube video for this step
- 2016 Census
- SimplyMap Canada (not covered)
- Color density map based on data from Statistic Canada
- Watch the video for this step
4. Reading up on your idea & staying up to date with articles
- Think about your business idea when searching, use a variety of keywords:
- (1) industry (use NAICS, watch out for jargon)
- (2) trade associations
- (3) market leaders and major competitors
- (4) other subject term like a business trend
- News and articles from the Library, better than Google News
- ProQuest Business Databases: more Canadian content
- EBSCO’s Business Source Complete: research and some current events
- Eureka.cc: French-language local news
- Setup an RSS feeds from ProQuest, EBSCO and Google to automatically receive notifications
Concordia University Library’s Business Research Portal:
Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 2019-08-22 à 11:24 am.