A recent invitation to deliver a guest lecture to MBA students from Flinders University Business School, in Adelaide, was time to think about some helpful lifelong research tips for business savvy students. 

My top 3 research tips for the international business students were tips to save time, and find reliable information – beyond their upcoming projects, and into their working lives.

Scan for business information every day
Your groups’ contacts, in-house knowledge and information gleaned from reading daily / weekly / occasional news sources from twitter, LinkedIn, news sources, industry alerts, and various newsletters, to name a few, are a valuable starting base to your research.

Go to who cares
Narrow down, and drill down your research by going to sources that care about the information you are looking for, including:

• the company
• corporate regulators
• media aggregators, such as Factiva.com
• company information aggregators – from free sources such as finance.yahoo.com to subscription sources, such as onesource.com
• investors – look at investor information provided on company websites
• industry groups for commentary, and trends happening in industries
• analyst reports
• librarians – always a good source for business information.

Bring together – online + in-house + offline
Finding insightful, reliable information on companies brings together information from a range of sources – depending on your budget, access and deadline, including:

• Web searching – for the company’s website and some investor info
• Pay per view / download sources – for sources, such as some analyst reports, and corporate documents filed with regulators
• Commercial subscriptions sources – such as Factiva, onesource.com
• In-house knowledge
  Build on a company’s in-house knowledge
• Hard to access company info
  There will usually be difficult to access information, which can be vital info for your research
• Personal knowledge
  Your personal knowledge is a valuable resource for business research
• Confidential information:
  Get to know the limits of information provided by public and private companies, and info kept confidential.