Research aims are the overall goals of a project; objectives are the steps that must be taken to achieve them.
Your research aims should address your research question and be accompanied by manageable objectives that will allow you to fulfil them.
Imagine that you have the following research question: ‘How do project teams in scientific ventures create new ideas?’
A research aim here might be to develop case studies of this process in a number of scientific ventures, while a research objective might be for you to exchange knowledge with project teams in those ventures so that you can develop a platform for writing your case studies.
Professor Wilson Ng,
PhD (Cantab.), MBA (London), MA (Cantab.), CDipAF (ACCA), FHEAI am a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship & Family Business at Regent’s University, London and an Adjunct Professor of Corporate Finance at Emlyon Business School, in Écully, France.
I am a former investment banker who read Mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge on an open scholarship.
On graduation, I joined the UK-French investment bank NM Rothschild & Sons as a management trainee.
For ten years I was a corporate finance advisor of technology and non-technology start-ups, initially in London and then in Singapore.
In 1992, I was head-hunted by the publicly-quoted specialist engineering firm, L&M Group Investments, as Group Finance & Treasury Director based in Singapore.
When L&M was taken over in 1999, I returned to Cambridge to study for a doctorate in entrepreneurial family firms.
In 2004 I graduated from Cambridge with a PhD (formally in Management Studies), and I have been a full-time research and teaching academic in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation since my graduation.
My research has involved comparative studies of resource management and strategic development processes in extremely challenge-based enterprises. These enterprises are motivated by economic, socio-cultural, cognitive, and/or physical challenges faced by their founders and stakeholders, whose continuing challenges inspire the development of particular adaptive skills and capabilities.
I am interested in the ways in which creative actors in challenge-based enterprises are able to leverage their capabilities and networks to achieve goals they have established because of their extreme challenges.
My current research advances this interest by exploring processes of opportunity creation among visually impaired entrepreneurs in a comparative study in the UK and USA.
I am also an advisory board member of a London City-based fintech crowd-funder and crypto-coin exchange, Crowd for Angels, and
a Founding Director of a valuation enterprise of new ventures, Business Valuation International.
My mother tongues are Chinese Cantonese and English, and I speak and write German, Italian, French, and Bahasa Malaysia, and converse in Chinese Mandarin.
I have taught and given research seminars in German, Italian, and French, in addition to English.
