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What is Enterprise? - Final Task

Final Task

In the resource Introduction to Business(http://www.bized.co.uk/educators/level2/busactivity/activity/intro110.htm) you were asked to select five businesses that you would be doing more work on. For each of the businesses in the private sector that you have chosen, find out something about their history - how they started, when they started and how they have grown over the years. You will generally find such information on the company's Web site.

Once on the home page you will need to look for links titled 'About us', 'Investor relations', 'FAQs' (Frequently Asked Questions), 'Corporate site' or 'Our history'. It sometimes takes a bit of finding but generally most of the larger businesses will have this somewhere on their site.

Remember when you are doing this research that you must not just copy and paste the information from a Web site. If you do this, you are plagiarising - copying something and claiming it as your own. If you do want to copy tables, charts, a quote and so on, always state where you got it. For example:

The text below is taken from the amazon.co.uk Web site. The head of Amazon is Jeff Bezos - he is a good example of an entrepreneur. I might want to use his text to demonstrate how a company such as this encourages enterprise in their employees. This is how I would reference the use of that information:

'At Amazon small working teams are deeply invested in their part of the business. As we grow, we continue to promote cross-functional teamwork, so it's possible that the people you work with will have all sorts of experience from other parts of our company. This team diversity encourages creativity, an open exchange of ideas across groups, and a respect for the challenges and tradeoffs present across our business. Our hands-on approach to work is really demonstrated during peak selling times: no matter what your role, you will have the opportunity of spending time at our distribution centre ensuring that products get to our customers in time.'

Source: Company Information, http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/static/-/jobs/how-we-work/026-3773610-1356443, accessed 19th October 2005

A photographer

Image: Always remember to respect the copyright of photographers!
Copyright: Bob Knight, http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=338390

Notice as well how we have put the information in italics and in inverted commas - this is to further show that this is not my work but is a quote from somebody else.

In general you would not count this type of thing as part of any word limit in a piece of coursework, for example. What is important is that you use the information you have taken wisely. This quote tells me something about the approach of the company in managing its employees and its attitude towards enterprise. Just copying a chunk of text to try and make your project look fatter won't get past examiners!

When using images, you should remember that copyright is an important issue. Copyright means that the ownership of that image belongs to a particular individual or organisation. When Biz/ed uses images from other Web sites, we always contact the owner of that image to request permission as we are republishing it. For your project, as you will not be republishing the image, you do not need to do this, but you must make sure you reference it correctly. This will show your teacher or examiner how much research you have done and where you obtained the image.

There are a number of Web sites that make images freely available for educational use. One of the best of these is stock.xchng(http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml), which we use for many of our images on Biz/ed.

When you reference your image, you need to make sure you credit your source correctly. For instance, the image on the right was taken by Bob Knight and added to stock.xchng. We have referenced the copyright owner, and the source, i.e. the Web address, in order to show you how to do this in your project work.

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