Seminar in Management & Entrepreneurship (Spring Semester 2025)

General Information

Registration

Students are required to register via KSL and submit the required information via Ilias to the folder “51-FS2025-0-Seminar Management & Entrepreneurship” providing the following:

• Preferred topic (priority 1-3)
• Optional: preferred team partner

If there are questions concerning the registration contact joelle.hofer@unibe.ch.

The registration is open from January 13th, 2025 to February 12th, 2025. Students will work in teams.

We are unfortunately not able to accept any applications after the registration period has ended.

The registration is binding and cannot be cancelled after the registration deadline (otherwise resulting in grade 1).

Preconditions

Enrolment in this course requires previous attendance and positive grade in the ‘strategic management’ (‘Strategische Unternehmensführung’) course (exceptions can be made for exchange students). 

Topics

We make the greatest possible effort to account for students’ preferences while assigning the topics. Topics are communicated via Ilias after signing up for the seminar.

The assigned topic and teams will be announced in the first lecture on the 19^th of February, 2025.

Teaching Approach and Performance Evaluation

General Information

The seminar thesis has to be written in teams consisting of two students dependent on the breadth of the systematic literature review.

Students have to report to their supervisors on their work progress (e.g., submission of a proposal, final version) during the semester.

Furthermore, students should carefully read and consult the seminar guidelines of the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship (available on the website) when writing their seminar thesis.

Evaluation

The quality of the seminar thesis will be evaluated based on its content, the student’s working progress as well as the implementation of the IMU-U guidelines as well as the presentation held during the semester. More detailed evaluation criteria as well as tips for structuring and writing a seminar thesis can be found in the seminar guidelines. We encourage students to read the guidelines thoroughly.

Course Description

In this course students will

• learn what the methodology ‘Systematic Literature Review’ is
• gain experience how to efficiently search for studies that focus on their main topic
• and how to present the vast amount of information reflected in their review’s sample as comprehensive as possible

This course is an excellent opportunity to acquire the technical skills needed to write a master thesis at our institute.

Goals and Learning Outcomes

As an overarching goal, participants of this course should be enabled to write a seminar thesis, following the procedure of a systematic literature review. Accordingly, students should be capable of performing the following:

• Defining the scope of a systematic literature review (i.e., getting to know how much literature on a topic is available, defining the research question(s), compiling keywords for the literature search, and setting up inclusion criteria)
• Performing a comprehensive literature search (i.e., accessing relevant data bases and perform the search based on key words and documenting this process, as well as its results)
• Assessing the quality of the identified literature (i.e., being able to separate better from worse articles regarding a list of selection criteria)
• Extracting data (i.e., identify relevant information in the selected literature and enter it into an extraction sheet)
• Synthesizing data (i.e., merging relevant information from multiple sources into one article by identifying and describing common threads; summarizing the state of knowledge by outlining ‘what we know’ on the given topic and ‘what we still need to know’)
• Writing up (i.e., displaying the results of the systematic literature review in the form of a seminar thesis paper, in line with the formal requirements documented in the seminar guidelines)

This course is an excellent opportunity to acquire the technical skills needed to write a master thesis at our institute.

Course Material

Recommended reading in advance:

• Denyer, D. and Tranfield, D. (2009). Producing a systematic review. In Buchanan, D. and Bryman, A. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 671–689. (available online on www.cemba.org)
• Hiebl, M. R. (2021). Sample Selection in Systematic Literature Reviews of Management Research. Organizational Research Methods
• Hitt, Michel A. & Ireland, R. Duane & Hoskisson, Robert E. (2006). Strategic Management Concepts, 7th edition, Cengage Learning
• Short, J.C. The art of writing a review article. (2009). Journal of Management, 35: 1312-1317
• Siddaway, A. P., Wood, A. M., & Hedges, L. V. (2019). How to do a systematic review: a best practice guide for conducting and reporting narrative reviews, meta-analyses, and meta-syntheses. Annual review of psychology, 70, 747-770.
• Tranfield, D., Denyer, D. and Smart, P. (2003). Toward a methodology for developing evidence-informed management knowledge by means of systematic review. British Journal of Management, 14: 207–222. (available online on www.cemba.org)

Course Overview