Bachelor or Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
Why would millennials rather go to the dentist than their bank? What problems do customers have in which industries? It will be your task to find out. There are diverging trends across industries. On the one side, studies such as the Millennial Disruption Index show the dropping happiness of customers with existing services, their predictions for the future, and how incumbents fail to develop the right products and services. On the other side, there are the successful start-ups of today which obsess about solving users' pain points and solving them as easily as possible.
There are multiple ways in which you can do research on customer pain points: Find out the common pain points in an industry; Analyse different industries for their susceptibility to customer disruption; Research the nature of pain points - e.g. When are customers willing to pay for resolving a pain point? Of course, there are many more possible topics, and you may choose freely. Consequently, the goals below greatly depend on the direction you choose.
🦾Who we are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focussed on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We want to always be early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future.
🎯 Goals
- Define your approach to research pain points that users and customers have
- Identify data sources for collecting painpoints (e.g. glassdoor, google evaluations, etc.) that can be analyzed (perhaps through scraping)
- Identify tools that companies use/can use to tracl any pain points of customers in real time
- Review literature on willingness to pay, pain points, and customer preferences
- Interview exemplary customers
- Analyze/Evaluate the pain points of customers, where they come from, and how they influence industries
- Present results on specific industries and/or companies as to what their pain points are
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Interest in Innovation / UX Research / Psychology / Disruption / Product Design
- Passion to understand users, customers, how consumer disruption works, and to do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
About Unhappy Customers by Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2019/06/disruption-starts-with-unhappy-customers-not-technology
The Millennial Disruption Index: https://www.bbva.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/millenials.pdf
Solving Pain Points through Design: https://medium.com/vmware-end-user-computing/from-pain-to-gain-solving-customer-pain-points-through-user-centered-design-c90378754832
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!