A Study of Crowdsourcing in Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Education

Crowdsourcing is an approach to harness knowledge and support from crowds using online platforms. Its use occurs within businesses and academia. Small businesses especially derive value from crowdsourcing because entrepreneurs have startup costs as well as time challenges to bring services/products to market. Entrepreneurs may also seek innovation and authenticity to differentiate from competitors. Since crowdsourcing offers these benefits, the researchers queried faculty from public and private universities who taught undergraduate classes in entrepreneurship to explore teaching methods utilized as well as specific aspects of crowdsourcing that were included. Researchers analyzed the resulting crowdsourcing gaps as well as crowdsourcing teaching challenges. Based upon their findings, new crowdsourcing learning activities and strategies were developed such that undergraduate entrepreneurship students may further benefit from crowdsourcing

Marketing Ethics: A Study of Significance Within National Professional Associations

Professional associations are expected to maintain a reasonable standard of behavior regarding how they market to their service bases. Prior research indicates that the use of written marketing ethics is not standardized and that business codes of ethics are a potential base for a universal code of marketing ethics from which all professionals could draw. We use document analysis to review several professional associations’ codes of conduct across several industries and quantify the mention of marketing ethics within each code to identify and explore gaps. The review found that some associations’ codes had significant representation, and others had a minimal or nonexistent representation of marketing ethics. Our findings also indicate that several external forces may determine the presence of marketing ethics and that such sporadic inclusion of marketing ethics indicates a necessity to develop and implement marketing ethics to protect professional and organizational integrity and market and consumer interests