DB-FPX8740 narrows the strategy and innovation specialization's broad theoretical foundation into a specific, well-scoped dissertation topic, using structured seminar peer feedback to sharpen the direction.
From broad strategic interest to specific dissertation topic
DB-FPX8740 requires students to move from a general interest area (digital transformation, innovation management, competitive strategy) toward a specific, well-scoped topic grounded in a genuine, identifiable gap in the strategy and innovation literature.
Seminar peer feedback and iterative refinement
The course uses structured seminar presentation and peer critique to pressure-test emerging topic ideas — checking for appropriate scope, genuine literature grounding, and feasibility — before students commit substantial further effort to a specific research direction.
Key topics in DB-FPX8740
- Narrowing a broad strategy/innovation interest into a specific topic
- Grounding a topic in a genuine gap in the strategy and innovation literature
- Seminar-based peer feedback for topic refinement
- Assessing topic feasibility for dissertation-scale research
- Iterating on a topic based on structured critique
- Preparing a topic statement for formal proposal development
Working on refining your DB-FPX8740 dissertation topic?
Our doctoral business experts help refine genuine, well-scoped strategy and innovation dissertation topics.
Worked example: refining a digital transformation topic through feedback
- Initial topic: "Digital transformation success factors" — extremely broad, extensively studied territory
- Peer feedback: A peer notes hundreds of existing studies already address general success factors broadly
- Refinement: Narrowing to "the specific role of middle-management buy-in in digital transformation success within mid-sized manufacturing firms" — a more specific, less-studied population and mechanism
- Lesson: Seminar feedback helps catch an overly broad, already well-covered topic before significant further work is invested
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Frequently asked questions
Digital transformation success factors have already been studied extensively across many industries, organizational sizes, and geographic contexts, meaning a dissertation attempting to address this question broadly would struggle to identify a genuine, defensible original contribution beyond what hundreds of existing studies have already established, and would also struggle to maintain adequate research rigor across such an enormously broad scope. DB-FPX8740 teaches that narrowing to a more specific population, mechanism, or context — such as the specific role of a particular factor (middle-management buy-in) within a specific organizational context (mid-sized manufacturing firms) — produces a topic that is both feasible to investigate rigorously within a single dissertation and more likely to represent a genuine, defensible gap in the existing literature, since narrower, more specific research questions are generally less likely to have already been thoroughly answered by prior research.
A well-scoped dissertation topic should be specific enough that a focused literature search reveals a genuine, identifiable gap — not simply less research on the narrow topic in general, but a real absence of adequate investigation into the specific question being asked — while remaining broad enough to represent a meaningful, significant contribution worth a full dissertation's effort, rather than an overly narrow question whose answer wouldn't matter much to the field even if fully answered. DB-FPX8740 uses seminar peer and faculty feedback specifically to help students calibrate this balance, since students working alone on their own topic often struggle to accurately judge whether their topic has actually reached this appropriately narrow-but-significant scope, or whether it's still either too broad (an already well-covered general area) or has become too narrow (a genuinely trivial question unlikely to interest the broader field).