Having the chance to interview people from an industry that interest you
Having the chance to interview people from an industry that interest you will help broaden your network and further embed yourself in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This hands on learning experience may help open up new career avenues, win internships, access potential mentors, or even get hired!
For this task, you are asked to interview three entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or small business owners. That is, people who:
- are currently business owners, or
- have previously run a business or,
- have currently been working within an organisation and has an active role in contributing to its vision and implementing its mission.
It is your responsibility to find the entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or small business owners to interview. The challenge of this assessment is for you to show initiative and find appropriate people to interview. The finding process starts during the first tutorial to get you get you finding appropriate interviewees and continues outside class during your own time if needed.
Your tutors will give guidance on (1) how to approach your interviewees, (2) how build your interview questions, (3) how to run interviews, (4) how to follow-up after an interview, (5) how to code and analyse your interviews, and (6) how to write up your findings.
These interviews are not for academic research purposes and will only be used as a point of reflection for you and assessment in this class. Ideally, you would want to make sure to run the three interviews no later than the end of week 7 to give yourself at least three weeks to write and submit your report by the end of week 10.
If your find yourself running out of time (meaning by week 3 you still haven’t found any response from any potential interviewee) do let your tutor know in order to try and help you mitigate your situation. In exceptional situations where you were unable to identify the entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or small business owners despite the help of your tutor, you may be given the green light to use secondary data to build and develop a response to your interview questions. In this case, the entrepreneurs that you are expected to research need to have been reported on from a variety of secondary data sources (articles, books, interviews, documentaries).
The people you choose to interview could be:
- An entrepreneur or small business owner you know in Adelaide, Australia or from your home country.
- A friend or family member who runs their own business.
- Someone you know who runs a for-profit or not-for profit organisation.
- Someone you have tried approaching via email and is willing to help out. It is very crucial here to indicate to the interviewee that the interviews are not conducted for academic research purposes and will only be used as a point of reflection for you and assessment in this class.
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