Creating Courses Where Inquiry Can Travel

• To prepare for their professional lives, students need to learn to exercise judgment when established technical frameworks don’t provide clear answers.
• Giving students freedom to explore a topic isn’t enough; educators must help them develop focused questions, build evidence-based arguments, and defend their conclusions.
• When educators provide opportunities for inquiry to travel to new situations, they help students use what they learn in one context to recognize opportunities in others.

 
Business students are often trained to solve well-defined problems, but professional life rarely offers that luxury. In the real world, technically correct answers can be incomplete when evidence points in different directions, assumptions can be challenged, or priorities compete.

That said, disciplinary knowledge remains essential. Students must understand established concepts, frameworks, and methods, and they must know how to apply relevant analytical tools. But they also need to know what to do when those frameworks and tools do not settle the problem at hand.

This is where I see the value of teaching students to engage in research-informed inquiry. I use the term to describe a pedagogical approach that moves students from applying established knowledge to examining what the available evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and which judgments can be reasonably defended. When students engage in this approach, they ask questions, test assumptions, compare interpretations, and explain why one conclusion is more persuasive than another.

Research-informed inquiry is not simply a research method by another name. It is a way to ensure that asking questions, gathering evidence, and making judgments is an integral part of disciplinary learning.

The question for educators, then, is not simply how they can ensure that inquiry appears in a particular activity. It’s how they can determine where that inquiry is allowed to travel.

This matters for entrepreneurial thinking because opportunity recognition can begin before an individual considers a new business idea, crafts a business model, or pitches a startup to potential investors. It can begin when students recognize that an apparently settled problem is not settled at all—and start asking what is missing, what could work better, and what evidence would justify action.

When the Rules Stop Being Enough

In a postgraduate Strategic Business Reporting module that I lead, I ask my accounting students to move beyond merely applying technical knowledge to exercising professional judgment. For example, one assessment places students in the role of a financial controller who is advising a board about which of three banking groups the organization should invest in. Students consider both financial and nonfinancial performance measures before making and justifying an investment recommendation. During this process, they also consider whether the most financially attractive choice conflicts with the organization’s environmental, social, and ethical priorities.

Technical knowledge anchors the task, but that knowledge alone cannot help students make a decision. The question they consider moves from “Which calculation is correct?” to “Given what we know, what should this organization do and why?”

Research-informed inquiry is a way to ensure that asking questions, gathering evidence, and making judgments is an integral part of disciplinary learning.

In class, students use discussion, paired problem-solving, mapping, and interactive activities to work through the decision-making process. Different students may initially emphasize financial performance, sustainability, governance, or stakeholder information. By asking them to explain their reasoning and respond to alternative interpretations, I help them not only reach a conclusion but also know why that conclusion is defensible—especially when the answer is not obvious.

In one previous cohort, a student initially identified Lloyds Bank as the stronger option when focusing on profitability and financial leverage. However, after considering additional performance measures, sustainability evidence, and all three banks’ wider strategic fit, the student ultimately recommended HSBC. To make the final recommendation, the student relied on available relevant evidence rather than on financial measures alone.

The professional judgment students develop becomes a bridge between knowledge and action. They don’t just know what technical framework a situation requires; they know what to do when evidence, organizational priorities, and stakeholder considerations point in different directions.

The same principle applies beyond accounting. Finance students may question valuation assumptions. Marketing students may ask whether customer evidence really supports an opportunity. Strategy students may question whether an established framework still explains a changing environment. The subject may change depending on discipline, but the process is similar: Apply knowledge, examine evidence, and make a judgment.

Giving Students Choice—and Enough Support

In another undergraduate module that I lead called International Accounting and Finance Issues, I guide students as they move through several phases of a project. In that project, they choose and justify a topic before preparing academic posters that clearly show their findings. Then, they present the content of those posters at a student conference. Finally, they reflect on the skills they have developed.

Leading a cohort of 383 students in 2025–26 has shown me that giving students the freedom to choose their topics does not automatically lead to their engaging in a focused inquiry. Some students can explain why certain topics interested them but find it harder to explain why the choice mattered. Others can find a few articles but struggle to connect those sources into a clear argument.

That’s why, during discussions, one question I often ask is: “What prompted your choice?” If students answer simply that they thought their topics were interesting, I push them to explore their reasoning more deeply—why the choice matters, what problem or debate sits behind it, what evidence exists to direct their inquiry, and what conclusions the literature can reasonably support.

Students can explore questions that practitioners are still working through and consider how to judge materiality, why reporting practices differ, and what makes information useful.

The observations they make in response to my question shape the next phase of the module. As students consider their topics, I introduce resources to help provide them with a clearer starting point, such as the Chartered ABS Academic Journal Guide to help students assess the quality of the journals they use to support their conclusions. Once students’ topics are approved (usually around Week 4), I introduce Publish or Perish as an optional literature-search tool to help them find and analyze academic sources as they develop the evidence base for their posters.

I initially help students frame the problems they have chosen to examine. They then investigate those problems, gather evidence, and develop their arguments. As students progress through the project, I gradually step back. By the time of the poster conference, they must explain and defend their arguments themselves.

At past conferences, for instance, students have presented on whether mandatory sustainability reporting is more effective than voluntary disclosure in improving transparency and accountability, and on how auditors should navigate responsibility when AI-generated outputs create ethical and accountability concerns. Topics such as these are particularly effective because they force students to defend positions for which there are no simple answers.

The lesson for me is simple: Giving students choice is not enough. They also need guidance on how to turn an interesting topic into a focused question and well-supported argument.

Research-informed inquiry can also bring new questions into the classroom. For example, I sometimes ask students to discuss emerging areas in my own research, such as the implications of sustainability-related disclosures under International Financial Reporting Standards S1 and S2. Examining existing standards is useful because formal requirements do not answer every question about how those requirements should be applied in practice. In this way, students can explore questions that practitioners are still working through; they can examine established requirements while considering how to judge materiality, why reporting practices differ, and what makes information useful.

From Inquiry to Entrepreneurial Judgment

The teaching examples I present above are not entrepreneurship exercises in the conventional sense. Students aren’t simply asked to be creative and generate new possibilities. They are required to develop habits that support entrepreneurial judgment, such as questioning what appears settled, examining evidence, recognizing what remains unresolved, and deciding what should happen next.

These exercises also help students recognize when an existing idea is worth refining. When students investigate a problem carefully, they may begin to recognize a gap between how something currently works and how it might function more effectively. Inquiry therefore does more than test an existing idea; it can help shape that idea into something better.

Inquiry does more than test an existing idea; it can help shape that idea into something better.

Depending on the context, an opportunity might emerge from an information gap, an inefficient process, a governance weakness, an unmet customer need, or a problem that established practice has failed to solve. It requires students to ask the underlying entrepreneurial question: What could be improved, for whom, and based on what evidence?

Standard 4 of AACSB’s Global Standards for Business Education makes this connection particularly timely. This standard links curriculum innovation and experiential learning with current scholarship, evidence-informed practice, and meaningful engagement with business. Research-informed inquiry offers a practical way to bring these elements together.

Design for Travel, Not Just Completion

For educators, this classroom approach can be summarized in three connected moves:

• First, anchor students in enough disciplinary knowledge to understand the problem. Without sufficient grounding, inquiry can easily become unsupported opinion.
• Next, open the problem to inquiry. This might involve discussing a real case, examining competing evidence, balancing changing assumptions, considering different stakeholder perspectives, or exploring a question that an established framework does not fully settle.
• Finally, allow the inquiry to travel. In other words, ask students to use the same ways of thinking in a different context: another case, a subsequent assessment, a self-selected research question, an organizational problem, or an engagement with practice.

These three moves turn an interesting classroom activity into a way of thinking students can use elsewhere. One inquiry activity is not enough. Students need opportunities to use the habits they have developed in new situations.

The Ability to Know What’s Worth Doing

This call to action does not mean that every business school needs to create another entrepreneurship module or that every class needs to become a research project. It does, however, require us to think more carefully about what happens after students have learned the content. Can a technical question become a decision that requires judgment? Can a problem the educator presents lead students to frame their own questions? And can what students discover help them recognize something worth improving?

When those opportunities exist, research-informed inquiry naturally helps students build the same skills we target through experiential and entrepreneurial learning. Disciplinary knowledge gives students somewhere to begin, inquiry helps them understand what the evidence means, judgment helps them decide among competing possibilities, and entrepreneurial thinking leads them to ask what might be worth doing next.

One of the most valuable things a business school can teach students may not be how to find the right answers, but how to discover which questions are worth acting on.