Here you find all relevant starting information for writing your Bachelor's or Master's thesis, Project Study, or IDP at the Chair for Strategy and Organization.
Topics of this page
Preliminary remarks
General Information about your thesis
Different thesis types and procedures (research & practice-oriented)
Our Thesis Seminar
Information regarding Project Studies and IDPs
FAQs
In our team and in collaborations, we highly value conscientiousness, autonomy, and proactivity. Please send regular (about once per month) updates per email which concisely and shortly summarize the follwing points:
Please specify your questions that only your supervisor can answer.
For all other questions, please ask them in the Q&A sessions of our thesis seminar.
Administration:
Submission documents:
The faculty has allowed solely digital submissions! If your supervisor does not notify you otherwise, the following documents need to be submitted digitally together with your thesis. Again, your supervisor may require additional submissions and will notify you about it.
Please send all documents per email to your supervisor. In case, the files are too large, you can send them via Dropbox, LRZ Sync&Share, Wetransfer or similar. Submit the files marked with a star (*) additionally to this form: https://forms.gle/qJBv4adescNZfEQn9:
Final Thesis: Thesis (as word and pdf)
Executive summary:* short summary of your thesis (3-5 pages) (as word and pdf)
Optional: Prepare your executive summary as an article on medium: https://medium.com/ (or any other free publication medium) and include a word document with the link to the article in the shared folder.
Presentation on your thesis topic (as ppt)
Infographic on your thesis topic* (as ppt and PDF/JPEG)
Notion page on your thesis topic* (should also contain your infographic and a link to the article if available)
Appendix:
Create an One Pager according to this template:
Note: The scope and expectations for the Pain Point Analysis and Pitch Deck must be clarified at the beginning of your project with your supervisor.
Templates for your pitch deck:
https://pitch.com/templates/collections/Pitch-deck
Or checkout Airbnb’s famous pitchdeck:
For more details about your final thesis, please see information below.
For more details about submissions 2 to 5, please refer to the thesis seminar.
Designation of documents:
Assessment:
Once you completed and submitted your work, your supervisor will grade it. When we finished our evaluation, we will enter your grade to the online portal of the TUM School of Management.
We will forward the grade report to grade management and they will enter your grade in TUMonline. Please note that this process may take up to 2 weeks!
Formatting guidelines:
Here are the general scientific formatting guildelines of our chair and the current APA manual for all additional formatting questions.
Guidelines_ScientificManuscripts.pdf
Research checklist for students.docx
Template for Cover page: https://portal.mytum.de/corporatedesign
Log in with your TUM account, Sitemap > Corporate Design > Vorlagen > Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten - Deckblatt – Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeit
Template for declaration of authorship: https://www.ie.mgt.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cem/tim/Abschlussarbeiten/8_Declaration_of_Authorship_Master_s_Thesis.pdf
Optionally, a template for LaTeX incorporating the guidelines of our chair is available here: Thesis Template Chair for Strategy and Organization (APA7) https://latex.tum.de/templates/5f6082fb7e4e66b3014a16f3. To create a sharelatex project, you have to log in with your TUM-ID (e.g. "ab12asdf") and your password. Documentation is available under https://sharelatex.tum.de/learn.
There are three types of theses at our chair. Please make a suggestion for your type of thesis to your supervisor and get approval.
For a start, please go through the slides about the empirical research process in the thesis seminar. The materials within the thesis seminar also contain, recordings of the detailed explanation of these slides and a number of scientific articles.
A. Empirical thesis:
Your empirical thesis should consist of Abstract, Introduction, Theory, (Hypothesis development for quantitative research), Method, Results, Discussion (incl. theoretical implications, limitations & directions for future research, practical implications), and Conclusion. The theory part (i.e., theory + hypotheses) should roughly take up the same space as the empirical part (i.e., methods + results) and should together amount to around 80% of your thesis. Smaller deviations are not problematic; larger ones should be discussed with your supervisor. Typically, it is important to see a clear research model (visualized; typically with about 2 to 6 hypotheses) in your thesis, which is, subsequently, empirically tested. The “testing” part may take on different forms, of course: via an own data collection or secondary data.
Of course, hypotheses are not always supported. This is quite normal, and your grade does not depend on significant results. In fact, they may sometimes be even more interesting as they challenge theory – that is if they are well analyzed and interpreted! It is important for us that deviating results are mentioned and discussed in the Discussion part: Which meaning do those results have for theory? Our understanding of the world? Why were certain results found, and others not? What do we learn from your thesis?
We propose starting with the theory part, then continuing with the empirical part, discussion and conclusion. Finish by writing the introduction.
The theory part still takes a significant portion of this paper and should be based on a complete literature review table. This literature review follows specific steps which help you organize your literature search process. Documentation of the included papers is very important. As an example, please find a completed literature review below Please read the instructions and papers in the excel file itself for further instructions.