Join Linda Hauck, Business Librarian, Falvey Library, for a Backpack to Briefcase: Business Research session. Competitive Intelligence involves gathering, analyzing, and acting on data that impact an organization’s future success. This introductory research session will focus on how to gather public information across multiple sources about competitors and industries. CI allows organizations to make better decisions, see opportunities and avoid pitfalls. Knowing how to gather information is the first step.

Bring your laptop and an appetite to flex your CI skills and enjoy free pizza!

The workshop will be offered on the following dates:

•    Monday, Oct. 23 at 5 p.m., Falvey Library, Room 206: REGISTER HERE
•    Monday, Dec. 4 at 5 p.m., Falvey Library, Room 205: REGISTER HERE
•    Wednesday, Dec. 6 at 5 p.m., Falvey Library, Room 205: REGISTER HERE

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

By Linda Hauck

Villanova faculty and students now have access to Pitchbook. Pitchbook provides data on companies, investors, and deals in the private equity and venture capital space.

Pitch book offers screeners for companies, deals, funds, investors, and service providers. These are not your typical screeners limited to filtering by geography, profitability, and industry.  The screeners are much more granular than most, including specialized criteria relevant to rapidly evolving businesses with deal types, debt characteristics, web and social media metrics, verticals, and patent holdings, to name a few.

The Pitchbook Library Research Center has reports on industries, technologies, and public and private market performance and benchmarks. Here, you’ll find surveys on sustainable investment, European M&A activity, and reports on agtech and food as medicine. Pitchbook is the best tool at our disposal for learning about emerging businesses. If you’re looking for firms working on renewable ocean energy, youth banking, anti-aging, smart packaging, or cannabis beverages, browsing the emerging spaces will get you there.

Use cases for Pitchbook include business development and marketing, tracking competitors investments, environmental scans for innovative products and services, finding potential investors,  analyzing industry and vertical trends, and finding Villanova alumni.

Access Pitchbook with your Villanova email address.  Downloading is limited and regrettably our subscription does not include live support, the mobile app or Excel add on.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Linda Hauck

One of the favorite parts of my job is to support students in their search for data and statistics. Some students needs are met by a quick search in Statista, a database that aggregates data and statistics on a wide range of topics or a smart google search employing filetype:xls or site:.gov. These quick solutions are satisfying, for sure, but the real fun happens when students need multiple datasets for data analysis, or a research methods project.

To help these students, I start the conversation by asking about their topic and how they envision using data. We talk about their ideal dataset keeping in mind how it might be generated, who is likely to collect the data, what frequency, granularity, time period, populations, and geographies are needed. If there is an agency or organization that is obviously most likely to compile the idea dataset, it makes sense to start there. If not, doing a scholarly literature review and focusing on the data or methods section of papers will point to potential sources.

This data exploration process can be time consuming but fun!

Grace Liu, Business Librarian at West Chester University, with the advice of Bobray Bordelon, Economics & Finance Librarian/Data Services Librarian at Princeton University distilled the process in this neat infographic.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Linda Hauck

Villanova faculty and students now have access to the ISS Directors and NEO Diversity Datasets.  The datasets encompass over 27,000 companies, globally.  Characteristics of company board members and named executives are documented.  This is a unique data set because not only are age, nationality and gender of persons recorded but ethnicity is as well.  Ethnicity data sources are by firm disclosure, by survey feedback, and analyst identification.

It is a well documented and rich source of information about company diversity policies, statements and goals too.   Outcomes backed up by numbers and percentages of board and officer composition by ethnicity, gender, age, tenure, and experiential factors are presented. The complete data dictionary is available here.

At present this data is available by SFTP via FileZilla or WinSCP.

Instructions are available here and linda.hauck@villanova.edu or ref@villanova.edu will share the password with authorize users. It is expected that this data will be on WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services) later in the year.  Contact linda.hauck@villanova.edu if you would like to schedule a training session.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Linda Hauck

Graduate and undergraduate business students often work on international market entry strategies for cases and consulting clients. Devising a winning strategy is contingent on analyzing a wide range of data about specific locations. National level data isn’t always sufficient. That’s why the Library added the Cities module to Passport (Euromonitor). Students can spend less time tracking down data and more time interpreting it to solve business problems.

The Cities module contains time series data on consumers, economic conditions, and sustainability. Historic and current consumer data covers demographics, income, expenditures, wealth, and digital access.  The economic variables available include GDP, employment, unemployment, labor force participation, inflation, consumer prices by sector, exports, and wages. Measures of mobility, pollution and climate can be used to assess sustainability potential. Coverage is not limited to the single financial or commercial center of a country: Over 1200 metropolitan areas on every continent are included.

These same data points are contextualized in Cities Reports, which benchmark and rank each city against their home countries and regions using a variety of data visualizations. Significant changes are highlighted as are unique or stand out conditions.

Accessing the Cities Reports and Data can be tricky due to the wealth of information on Passport. The Economics tab and Search all Categories box enable drilling down to the cities and variables needed.

Passport (Euromonitor) Economies: Cities module isn’t the only Library-subscribed content for learning about urban centers. Statista offers Global Business Cities Reports which feature social, economic, and cultural data.  Access World News and Factiva provide access to foreign language and English newspapers published in cities around the world.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA is the Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

International Open Access Week is an occasion to promote and celebrate the equitable sharing of knowledge. One way Villanova, through the Affordable Materials Project(AMP), encourages knowledge sharing is by supporting faculty who adopt open educational resources (OER). The Open Educational Resource Faculty Adoption Grant has much to celebrate!

Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials, often textbooks, that are typically free to use and a have Creative Commons license permitting reuse, adaption, and sharing. This means students don’t have to pay for OER e-textbooks and faculty can customize them to meet their learning objectives. The OER Faculty Adoption Grant was established to recognize faculty for all the effort that goes into revising syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, and assessments.

Past OER Faculty Adoption Grant recipients shared insights and tips about their experiences in forums recorded in 2022 and 2021.  Students participated too and noted the use of OER offered a welcome reprieve from financial pressures and contributed to their class engagement and participation.

Past awardees, Dr. Stephanie Katz Linkmeyer and Professor Jeanne Liedtka, spearheaded departmental evaluations of OER for General Chemistry I (CHEM 1151) and OER for Corporate Responsibility and Regulation (VSB 2007) which resulted in OER adoptions.  Fall 2022 is the first semester OER will be used by all sections of these courses, resulting in significant cost savings for students.

Applications are being accepted for the OER Faculty Adoption Grant through Nov. 18, 2022. Subject librarians can assist with finding suitable OER. For eligibility requirements, review criteria, and grant requirements, click here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian

The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a key tool used by both entrepreneurs and existing organizations to launch, grow, and sustain businesses and social enterprises.  Villanova’s Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship coaches innovators across campus on how to work through the BMC for their ventures.

Completing a Business Model Canvas is a key requirement for competing in the Villanova’s Student Entrepreneurship Competition (VSEC), held during the spring semester, which awards over $20 thousand dollars in prize money.

The Library collaborated with Stephen Green, Assistant Director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, to curate a Business Model Canvas Guide with databases, books, articles, and research tips for filling in the BMC.  When I met with Green in the IDEA Lab, he said completing the BMC is required for VSEC because it is a necessary tool for “visualizing and analyzing any ventures’ strategy.”  He remarked that “teams use the BMC to stay on track and keep each other accountable.” Determining optimal revenue or profit models, he noted, prove to be most challenging for many teams.

The Business Model Canvas Guide may be ideal for entrepreneurs with a DIY orientation. But Business Librarian, Linda Hauck, is also available for consultations for those who appreciate a personalized, targeted approach.

Talking with fellow entrepreneurs is another great way to generate ideas about how to approach populating your BMC. Nova Women Entrepreneurship Panel, held on Monday, Oct. 17, at 5 p.m. in the IDEA Lab is a great opportunity to learn from founders. You can register here.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Linda Hauck

Current news databases are used by researchers across disciplines to stay current with developments, construct meaning out of evolving events, and analyze content for political, social, cultural, and public health trends.

Having access to a wide range of local, regional, national, and international sources is key.  Falvey Library has significantly improved access to news by subscribing to Factiva, which adds over 6000 unique, full text titles to our collection, including The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Chicago Daily Herald. Transcripts of National Public Radio’s Code Switch and Fox News’ Hannity are searchable. Many foreign language publications are included as well.

The range of trade news is impressive, from Backpacker to Diabetes Week and Global Warming Focus to Oil Market Intelligence. Factiva is a Dow Jones product so the news coverage and indexing is particularly good for financial, economic, and business topics.

The search interface is flexible.  The “Free Text” search box can be used to replicate a search similar to Google; the “Search Form” provides prompts for more focused queries; and examples of advanced search commands facilitate precision searching.  When using either the “Free Text” or “Search Form” handy options for filtering results by subject, industry, region are available. Factiva’s default is to limit searches to the most recent 3 months, so researchers with a deeper time line will need to modify the date range.

Factiva’s Company/Markets tab is an added bonus. Company profiles describe the business segments, corporate family, financial results, and peers, but their real advantage is the depth and breath of company news provided.  The industry snapshots are less robust, but do rank key competitors, facilitate a deep dive into the news, and offer recent analyst reports.

Factiva compliments our other news aggregators, Access World News, Nexis Uni, and ABI Inform, and our direct subscriptions to top news such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.

For a full list of news sources including archives see Databases A-Z filtered by newspapers.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Linda Hauck

Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash

The Library is hosting a trial to Factiva, an international news database, by Dow Jones. A wide range of news reporting formats, including newspapers, magazines, wires, podcasts, TV news transcripts, and blogs in multiple languages, are offered. Factiva is a one-stop shop for influential national news sources, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times. All editions of key international publications, such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde and China Daily, are also available.  Many local papers, trade, and professional publications are included. Most of the content is archival, current and full text. A detailed title list is available. In addition, Factiva includes company and industry snapshots.

Factiva News Search Interface

Customization options abound in the form of Alerts and Newsletters. The News Pages tab conveniently groups top publications by industry and region to facilitate browsing and searching. The Search Builder tab employs boolean operators and filtering for efficiency and ease.

As the name suggests, Global Newsstream also provides coverage of local, national and foreign news publications. The search interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a Proquest database.

We simultaneously have trials to three competing news databases: Factiva, Proquest’s Global Newsstream and Newsbank’s Access World News. Put Factiva and Global Newsstream to test here. Please take a moment to share your feedback on these resources with the library. The trials run through Sept. 30, 2021.

Linda Hauck, MLS,  MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

Corporate annual reports and SEC filings are the raw materials used for content analysis by researchers examining company histories, corporate strategy, risk, disclosures about environmental and human capital, governance & communication differences to name just a few areas of inquiry. Villanova now has access to collections of these documents in Mergent Archives listed on Databases A-Z and the Business Subject page.

The historical glossy annual report collection includes US companies as well as Canadian, European, Latin American, Africa, Middle Eastern, and Asian.  There are over one million reports in the collection going back to the 19th Century. Full runs for all firms are not immediately available, but this is a growing collection and efforts are being made to achieve full coverage.

The collection, which is in in Adobe PDF format, can be searched by company name, country, and year. The SEC  historical collection (also in PDF format) includes only 10-K, 11-K, and 20-F filings from 1970 to 1995. They can be searched by company name, year, and state.

In addition, the Mergent Archives platform includes historical Moody’s/Mergent Manuals covering the industrial, transportation, banking and finance, public utility, international, and OTC sectors.  Also included are the CRB Commodity Yearbooks from 1939 to present.  Each volume includes data tables and contemporaneous market analysis for commodities from apples to ethanol, soybeans to zinc.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is the Business Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.