Business: Overview

What is a business? In Peter Drucker's view, the first purpose of a business is to create a customer (i.e. to satisfy customer need) and the second purpose is innovation (Finklestein, 2009). A business is not defined from inside. It is defined from outside by the customer who buys a product or service from the business. In his discussion of disruptive innovation, Clayton Christensen reminds businesses to ask themselves a question: ‘What jobs are customers hiring your products to do?’ (Christensen, 2006). To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

From  Palgrave Key concepts: Key concepts in innovation. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

This guide contains material for the field of Business as a whole and is a great place to begin research.  For more targeted research based on common areas of concentration in Business, you should also use the following Research Guides.

• Labor Movements
• MBA Field Study: The Business Environment in Germany
• Resources for Legal Research
• Sources for Statistics
• The Financial Life Cycle

Credo Topic Pages bring together various resources available through some of the library's subscription databases. Designed by the Credo Reference database, topic pages provide excellent background material including definitions, encyclopedia entries, scholarly articles and relevant e-books.