Having submitted a draft management challenge last week and receiving mostly positive feedback I feel I am in good shape to wrap this up in the next few week. I have a bit of tidying up to do and will then distribute to my 'volunteer' proof readers! It will be good to finish this before Christmas and be able to start 2013 fresh and ready to take on new challenges.

The research proposal was accepted on the working title of ‘The Strategic Direction of Potential Absorptive Capacity in Technology firms‘. The key aims being to understand where product ideas come from within technology based SMEs using the concept of Absorptive Capacity (Cohen and Levinthal 1990) as a theoretical framework. The final aim being to provide insights that could be used by SMEs to guide their efforts into knowledge acquisition and assimilation.
This may call for deeper access into SMEs to better understand the issues around knowledge management, culture, strategy and key roles around which this mechanism happens. It was first thought on the research strategy was that an array of views could be taken from companies through semi-structured interviews. Now it may be more appropriate to use a case study approach based on two or three companies to cover the context and content of the study subjects more fully.