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Many of the sources constituting the management literature that were dealt with in the previous chapter will also provide business information. However, there are other sources that can be used, particularly for company and industry information.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the state of undergraduate business statistics education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and assess its alignment with the best practices in equipping business graduates with the knowledge and skills demanded by the labor market.

A survey of 108 instructors from 80 business schools in 17 MENA countries was conducted to gauge information on the delivery of business statistics courses. The survey results were benchmarked to a proposed framework for best practices in business statistics education.

The gap analysis identified deficiencies in the delivery of business statistics education in the region as compared to international best practices. This study revealed a need to revise statistics education as part of a comprehensive reform of business education with the aim to meet international quality standards in business education.

The study relied on the self-reported responses of business statistics instructors in MENA. One hundred eight questionnaires were completed, corresponding to a response rate of 40 per cent. Moreover, the study did not measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning in business statistics courses.

Recommendations from the study are intended to guide business statistics instructors in improving the quality of business statistics education through adopting more effective ways to enhance student learning experience and graduate employability.

This study is the first of its kind to investigate and assess the business statistics education in the MENA region.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the need to engender a positive attitude toward business analytics in order for firms to more effectively transform into data-driven businesses, and for business schools to better prepare future managers.

This paper develops and validates a measurement instrument that captures the attitude toward business statistics, the foundation of business analytics. A multi-stage approach is implemented and the validation is conducted with a sample of 311 students from a business school.

The instrument has strong psychometric properties. It is designed so that it can be easily extrapolated to professional contexts and extended to the entire domain of business analytics.

As the advent of a data-driven business world will impact the way organizations function and the way individuals think, work, communicate and interact, it is crucial to engage a transdisciplinary dialogue among domains that have the expertise to help train and transform current and future professionals.

The contribution provides educators and organizations with a means to measure and monitor attitudes toward statistics, the most anxiogenic component of business analytics. This is a first step in monitoring and developing an analytics mindset in both managers and students.

By demonstrating how the advent of the data-driven business era is transforming the DNA and functioning of organizations, this paper highlights the key importance of changing managers’ and all employees’ (to a lesser extent) mindset and way of thinking.

It is flattering that a statistician should be asked to address a gathering of librarians. In Five Orange Pips Sherlock Holmes remarks that a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture he is likely to use and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library where he can get it if he wants it. I have no view about Conan Doyle's definition of a library as a lumber room, but certainly I find the little brain attics of librarians well stocked with one of the two branches of epistemology, as Dr Johnson defined them: ‘Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information about it’. I pay tribute to the ability of librarians to find information about statistics, despite what must occasionally seem to them the perverse ingenuity with which statisticians make the task difficult. It is easy enough to find United Kingdom statistics. There are an infinity of them—in the Digests of Statistics, of Financial Statistics, of Regional Statistics, and so on. The trouble is that those who inquire of you usually want a particular statistic—although the phrase ‘any figures will do’ is one which is not unfamiliar to me. To find in the forest of United Kingdom figures the particular sapling which a researcher is seeking is sometimes far from easy. My experience is that the librarians know their way about the lumber at least as well as we statisticians do.

“Where do I find the Consumer Price Index?” “What was last year's unemployment rate?” “How do I locate data on the number of 1979 cars sold?” The above questions are among a multitude that a reference librarian might be asked concerning business statistics. To find the answers to these questions, the librarian may use a variety of sources.

This is a very large subject area to discuss in forty minutes, therefore, I would like to begin by defining the aspects of the subject I intend to deal with. The statistics in the title refer to business and economic statistics only, examples of which are published by central statistical departments, trade associations and commercial publishers etc. Desk research is used to describe the process of gathering information available in published form, rather than obtaining the data directly.

The purpose of the article is to gain more insight into factors that can explain students' success in business subjects. The focus is on the connection between performance in introductory courses in business mathematics (BM) and business statistics (BS) and success in various business subjects.

Use of a regression model with administrative data from a business school in Norway over a period of 10 years.

The findings show a strong correlation, especially in quantitative subjects. The results suggest that statistical skills are more strongly related to academic success than mathematical skills.

The data are collected from only one school. No information on undergraduates' personalities and behaviours is available.

There are limited published studies that have explored the relationship between success in statistics and later achievements in business courses. This is useful knowledge for planning the content of the bachelor's programme.

The present study aims to investigate the effects of a number of demographic and academic factors, such as gender, age, nationality (Emirati vs non-Emirati), high school major (arts vs science) and high school score, on the academic performance – measured by overall grade point average – of undergraduate students majoring in statistics at United Arab Emirates University.

This study includes 188 undergraduate statistics students (142 female and 46 male) for the academic years 2012-2013 to 2015-2016. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data.

The results indicate that gender, age and nationality have no significant impacts on the academic performance of undergraduate students in statistics bachelor’s degree program, while high school major and high school score do.

This study had several limitations. First, only students of one university were included in this study, which would have limited the generalizability of the results. Second, the study focused on the impact of a limited number of factors on academic performance of undergraduate statistics students. But, the study has a number of implications for students, educators and university policy-makers.

The present study is the first attempt to explore the factors that might affect the academic performance of undergraduate students in statistics bachelor’s degree program in an Arabic setting.

This paper aims to contribute to indigenous entrepreneurship theory by identifying what constitutes an indigenous enterprise, focussing on Aotearoa New Zealand as a case.

This paper combines policy (quantitative survey) and academic research (qualitative interviews) to answer the same question, what is an indigenous enterprise in Aotearoa New Zealand?

The authors found a degree of consistency as to what counts as an indigenous enterprise in the literature (e.g., identity, ownership, values), yet a consensus on a definition of Maori business remains elusive. They also found that an understanding of the indigenous economy and indigenous entrepreneurial policy are impeded because of definitional uncertainties. The authors propose a definition of Maori business which accounts for indigenous ownership, identity, values and well-being.

The main limitation is that the literature and research use different definitions of indigenous enterprise, constraining comparative analysis. The next step is to evaluate our definition as a basis for quantifying the population of indigenous enterprises in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The research assists indigenous entrepreneurs to identify, measure and account for their contribution to indigenous self-determination and sustainable development.

This research has the potential to reconceptualise indigenous enterprise as a distinct and legitimate alternative institutional theory of the firm.

The research challenges assumptions and knowledge of entrepreneurship policy and practice generally and the understanding of what is the nature and extent of an indigenous firm.

This paper aims to introduce a new framework that helps to get an overview of contextual factors that influence the ability of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to survive the economic crisis in a business cluster, as parts of a system.

The spatial autologistic model and the logit regression tree (RT) were applied to SME manufacturing companies localized in the business clusters of the Italian Marche region to explain interconnection among the actors of the network and their heterogeneous behavior with the environment.

The main findings of the application confirm that contextual influences are decisive in the definition of firm’s survival, explained through the presence of spatial dependence in bankruptcy analysis, validating the transmission effects of corporate bankruptcy within the business clusters in the Marche region.

The estimation of the logistic RT allowed to identify sub-systems, homogeneous with respect to crucial context variables, with different firms’ behaviors in terms of probability to survive in the system and relation to their environment. Therefore, a systemic approach is required to provide a better understanding of such kind of phenomena.