A California city was worried it was failing local businesses. They asked a group of students to find out
When a small Bay Area city reached out to Northeastern for insights into its business support services, undergrads and grad students delivered “real, unvarnished feedback.”
Rick Li had just been hung up on by the manager of a restaurant when he managed to get through to the owner of an import company. To keep that person on the line, Li switched to Mandarin.
Li was one of more than a dozen Northeastern University undergraduate students working on a consulting project for Emeryville, California, to help the city design better support for its minority-owned businesses.
Of the city’s 875 businesses, students — led by business school professors at Northeastern — contacted 206 owners and conducted in-depth interviews with 16, asking them to share their experience operating in the small city between Berkeley and Oakland on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Northeastern’s recommendations were approved this week by an Emeryville city business committee and will soon go before the City Council.
“I personally got more comfortable talking to people,” Li says of the experience. “Just warming them up at the start of the call, like you have to with someone you don’t know. It was definitely a big help in terms of networking for jobs now.”
Emeryville’s city councilors established a priority to evaluate city services to see how well they supported minority business owners. Staff then reached out to Kate Karniouchina, an associate professor of marketing and director of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business on the Oakland campus, who had previously conducted research for Emeryville to assess the impact of new labor ordinances.
“We established a reputation as impartial and pragmatic researchers with good people skills and high levels of professionalism,” Karniouchina says. With this project, she was able to engage undergraduates. “Our students’ diverse backgrounds allowed us to reach out to some of the business owners who have not traditionally had a lot of interaction with the city.”
Students assisted with all aspects of the project, often stretching beyond their comfort zones. Cold-calling business owners to find people willing to participate in the study, for example, was easier for business and design major Alexandra Katz after Karniouchina gave her a script to follow.
“I wouldn’t say that I’m the person who would be the first to raise their hand to speak in front of a crowd,” Katz says, “but it was great and it made me more confident.”
Like most qualitative research, many calls to look for interviewees resulted in unanswered voicemails.
“It could be a challenge because you’re a small mom-and-pop shop,” says D’Amore -McKim marketing lecturer Magda Cooney. “Even if you have things you would like to share, you also struggle to find the time we were asking them to devote.”
But after weeks of effort, working from a list compiled by the Northeastern team from Yelp, a solid sample of minority-identifying restaurant, retail and service-provider owners emerged.
Editor’s Picks
“This was really a project that was needed, and students added a lot of value,” says Adam Parker, a professor of practice for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and a member of research faculty with the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. “Some of them were really very talented. We wrote up questions but we also empowered them to follow their instincts.”
Emeryville wanted a broad assessment of how business owners felt about the city. So Northeastern faculty designed an approach that included reaching out to people who already own businesses in the city, some who were considering the idea and others who were in Emeryville but left.
Students also assisted during a focus group with business owners and used artificial intelligence tools to synthesize the main insights that emerged.
“People who responded gave us really thoughtful answers to our questions,” says Megan Phuong, a master’s degree student in public administration. Phuong saw an opportunity in the project to learn hands-on about policy analysis and project management. “Listening to some of the conversations with business owners, they gave really valuable feedback to the city and to us.”
Overall, business owners appreciated Emeryville’s small-town feel, including a free shuttle that runs from public transit stations to the city’s main commercial strip. They also reported liking the comparative lack of bureaucracy in Emeryville, as compared to neighboring Oakland and Berkeley.
But many wanted more contact from the city when they first opened shop and more support with marketing.
“When business owners are talking to Northeastern staff or students, they can speak more freely,” says Chadrick Smalley, community development director for Emeryville. “I get more accurate information this way.”
Smalley specifically turned to Northeastern because Karniouchina is familiar with how the city works.
“Northeastern designs the process and the questions and they’re meant to elicit real, unvarnished feedback,” he says. “Putting more effort into outreach to the BIPOC business community should result in us deepening those relationships, which is mainly the findings of the Northeastern study.”
Students say they also benefited from performing the study. Alexandra Katz realized that she wants to pursue management and data analysis.
Megan Phuong said the experience confirmed her love for policy research and interacting with people. “It gave me a little taste and I’m hungry for more,” she says.
