EXECUTIVE PHD PROGRAMME

Research Proposal - Guidelines

Please submit a brief Research Proposal, which will enable potential supervisors to judge their interest in your proposed topic. This is intended to provide a useful starting point for discussion of your ideas. Your proposal should include:

Personal reasons for undertaking an Executive Doctorate (1 page)

Why do you want to do an Executive Doctorate at this point in time? What are your career aspirations post Executive Doctorate? What is your previous experience of research?

What research do you want to do? (2-4 pages)

What is the organizational issue driving your research interest? What have you read in your topic area that informs your research interest? Include 4-6 references and

explain what the papers have said and how these inform your research proposal. Why do you feel the research is important? Who will be interested in it, both from a practical and academic

perspective? What positive organizational impacts might your research produce? What kind of (proprietary) data do you have, or do you want to use in your research? How do you think the work might be carried out?

Points to Consider

As this is the first piece of written work a potential supervisor will see from you it is important for you to demonstrate you have looked carefully into the issue you wish to explore and you have given thought as to how you will go about investigating it.

The research for an Executive Doctorate is normally in a field in which the candidate has extensive work related experience. However, as research for a doctorate builds knowledge that can be used beyond the student's own practice, it is insufficient just to take learning from personal managerial experience and write about that to benefit others. Personal experience forms only part of the departure point for the research. At the outset, the Executive Doctorate researcher has to locate their research project both in an organizational issue important to their role, the organization as whole, or to a particular sector and also in existing literature and previous research.   The role of a researcher is to be curious and inquiring about a critical problem and find ways of investigating that problem so that new understandings are possible. This will be achieved through a process of designing and executing an appropriate research methodology that will enable you to gather and analyze data from relevant sources.  

Although doing a doctorate may develop you as a manager, or enhance your consulting practice and in some cases lead to career change, the field of your enquiry must be one in which you have a reasonable grounding and understanding. The Executive Doctorate training that you receive will enable you to search the existing literature to identify theories that inform the issue you wish to investigate. Your doctoral studies will enable you to bring insights from prior published work into your investigations, to build on these ideas and develop new understanding and insight.

The first year of the program will enable you to develop your research proposal iteratively from your initial ideas at the interview and so we are not expecting you to know all the relevant academic literature at this stage but your questions and ideas should stand up to the kind of scrutiny you would expect to get when presenting ideas to knowledgeable people in your field of study.

Prof. Ronald Mahieu & Prof. Bobby Banerjee (Programme Directors)