Breaking ground

Starting in January I had my first discussions regarding my upcoming thesis, and things seem to be progressing, despite a slightly slow pace as of yet. Anyway, I finally today broke ground by actually starting build a map of the relevant literature and authors in Excel. Reflecting back on my many learning experiences from my BSc thesis, I guess the best thing to do is to be smart about things; instead of randomly running into papers and reading everything that comes up, my strategy this time around in regards to literature can be summarized something like this:

1. Build the main corpus starting from a set of literature from one or two relevant courses from school. Break the articles down and do a simple analysis of references to attept to identify the key authors and potentially their key papers. In my case the literature will be primarily based on the field of industry evolution.
2. Since my specific topic is related to a topic which the bulk of industry evolution papers don't appear to touch directly, I'll have to most likely venture out into the periphery of literature to see if anything's present there. The tactic here will be to formulate some keywords and guestimates. Bonus points for articles which cite Utterback, Hannan, Klepper, Frenken, Abernathy, Carroll, etc.
3. The Big Books of systems thinking and dynamics. No direct link to the subject at hand from these books, except for potentially providing me a nifty hammer with which I can then hit everything with.

My hope is that by spending a bit time on actually analyzing the literature before jumping in will result in brownie points from school for finding the truly relevant articles as well as enabling me to actually read a lot less than I otherwise would. Also, a map is always a cool thing since you are less likely to get lost if you have one (although it's still nothing compared to the nifty Ovi navigation stuff that Nokia recently decided to start giving out free... Yeah, I know, this was a really cheap plug, but oh well...).

But, from now on I'll try to blog every once in a while about the progress of my thesis. Let's see if I can actually graudate by the end of the year...