Background of the Project
Introduction
The opinions and attitudes of Indiana’s business leaders affect us all. Their thoughts on issues such as state economic policies, the Indiana workforce, the relative attractiveness of Indiana as a state in which to conduct business, major challenges on the horizon, and key business trends they foresee drive their decisions – and those decisions collectively impact all Hoosiers. Yet until now, we have never had access to a comprehensive picture of what our business leaders are thinking about these and other topics.
The objective of this project is to identify key issues of Indiana’s business leaders and establish a baseline to track these issues over time. Key issues addressed in this project include:
- General challenges of doing business,
- Indiana’s economic climate,
- The role of government in economic development,
- Human resource and diversity issues,
- Indiana’s educational system, and
- Planning, managing and accessing information technology.
This report summarizes results of the first survey of this group. Our plan is to conduct a similar survey annually.
Methodology of the 2007 Online Indiana Executive Survey
The findings reflect both qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative research is useful for understanding the domainand relative importance of issues from the perspective of the target population, for identifying relevant vocabulary, and for uncovering truly new information. Quantitative research is useful for making inferences from a sample to an entire population of interest, for determining how widespread opinions or traits are within the population, and for uncovering potential relationships among all the variables measured. The research process included these key steps:
- Butler University MBA students collected and analyzed secondary and qualitative data.
- An online survey was designed and pretested.
- Over 1,050 Indiana business leaders were asked to participate in the survey, and over 210 CEOs and other executive officers responded.
