Research questions

One of the biggest challenges so far is nothing new to anyone who has ever written academic papers: how to define what it is exactly that you want to do and how to scope it? This often manifests itself as the difficult of defining a good research question. By instinct I would say that the difficulty is in trying to define a set of questions which are not only interesting, but also solvable while not being entirely naive. There may be more aspects as well, but those came to mind right away.

Regardless, the broad strokes of my thesis have been more or less clear for a while:

1. I want to look at two industries (automobile and ICT).
2. I want to use the industry evolution viewpoint and systems thinking (more specifically system dynamics) to hit stuff with.

What then happened was that I decided to more or less climb up a tree arse first, as I typically do. So I figured that maybe these two industries have links between each other, which could be manifested in various ways (e.g. by the emergence of ICT stuff in your everyday cars). Building off of this, I got excited and decided that obviously I could find some smaller subindustries from beneath the two and argue that they are moving towards each other, in which case my core idea would be to speculate on a collision test: how do two industries (or subindustries in this case) collide, what are the aspects related to something like this, and what does theory say about industry convergence or industry formation.

When I woke up this morning I decided that maybe I'm going at it the wrong way. Getting anything empirical from the above would possibly prove rather tricky. So I had another Idea, despite the fact that more intelligent people than I have said that when writing a thesis, if you get any type of idea you should immediately kill it as MSc theses are no places for ideas. I know these people to be true, but come on, I have an Idea and I trust myself implicitly!

So, maybe my problem is that I'm making too many assumptions about what might be happening. How the hell could I know what exactly is going on between two massive industries when I haven't even talked to any of the companies directly and tried to get an idea of what is actually happening. But one thing is certain: companies in these two industries are talking. Can't deny that. But will it result in industry convergence or industry formation? Perhaps not, as both are large, well established industries themselves. So maybe there isn't any collision to look at per se. But there are obviously cross-industry interactions going on in the form of companies talking with each other, doing products which interface increasingly with each other, participating in the same industry discussion platforms, talking with the same regulators, and so on.

Now, maybe a more dialed down version of an approach could be as follows:

• What are the mechanisms for companies to interact (e.g. collaborate) across different industries?
• How do cross-industry interactions shape the evolution of an industry? And vice versa?
• What is (and has been) happening with the automobile and ICT industries: what does theory say, what does practice say?

This set of questions seems, from my point of view, to be a lot less assuming than the original approach. They're also slightly more boring, and I've yet to figure out what exactly the really cool thing would be. But herein lies another point that I often overlook: maybe my thesis doesn't in fact need to create any type of radical new insight, maybe it's enough that I just apply the scientific method and solve at least the questions above. Getting empirical material for the above questions should be too difficult, so in this regard it also seems doable.

Finally, let me conclude by saying that most of the thinking I was doing while I was writing. And I spent about 15 minutes performing the act of writing. So I reserve the right to decide to revamp the approach at least three more times by lunch, and continue at that pace for as long as I see fit. But hey, it's better to have these types of mood swings at this point of the process, as opposed to the end of the process (I have experience about that as well: I ended up writing my BSc thesis three times during which I slightly evolved my viewpoint during every iteration: I can't suggest that approach too much...).