Small Business Development

In the fast-paced business world, many opportunities capitalize on speed. The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) supports economic development by delivering professional, high quality, individualized business advising and technical assistance to existing small businesses and pre-venture entrepreneurs. The Promoting Economic Development through Growing Small Businesses Creative Inquiry project, led by Drs. Jennifer Siemens and Peter Weathers from the Department of Marketing, and Ezgi Akpinar Ferrand, Director of the SBDC, gives students the chance to work with SBDC clientele in upstate South Carolina to quickly address their business needs.

This Creative Inquiry project departs from the typical academic course paradigm—that you have an entire semester to solve a problem and complete a project. Business does not work on a semester timeline. “One of the goals of CI is to expose students to as many different types of businesses and industries as possible,” Weathers said. In the real world, business involves quick thinking, multi-tasking and decision-making skills. Therefore, every 10 to 14 days, the students rotate to collaborate with a different set of business clients. This exposes students to a variety of small business styles and challenges, while acclimating them to the rapid pace of the business environment.

In today’s data-driven world, companies also expect their employees to understand how to interpret and analyze data; thus, this Creative Inquiry team uses current marketing databases to inform product development.

By the end of the Creative Inquiry project, the students become experts at developing various types of reports for clients, such as Custom Market and Business Intelligence Reports, In-Depth Location Analysis and Business Online Presence Audit. Zach Fahnle, a senior marketing major, particularly enjoyed using Esri GIS software for mapping and spatial analysis. “You can create a point and then look at various distances around it to get information about the different areas, like demographics, income levels, race, gender, etc. It’s really helpful when you’re trying to go after specific target markets, especially because a lot of these companies are really specialized,” Fahnle said.

To provide advice and assistance to small businesses, the students must learn about each company, work with them on current projects and observe how each business markets itself and runs operations. Students then access each company’s business plans and competitive intelligence studies to finalize the business analysis that they will present to the company.

While developing this Creative Inquiry project, Weathers recognized the potential value of this experience to graduate students. Future plans are to incorporate this experiential learning into the Department of Marketing’s master’s degree program. This Creative Inquiry project has not only benefitted students, but also local businesses and the university curriculum—it is a win-win-win.