Library Guides: MGMT 365: Social Entrepreneurship: Fall 2024: Co-living space

Company Information: the co.space

the co.space Website
The co.space's website will be an excellent source of information about how the living space functions, how residents are selected, how it is marketed to prospective residents, and more.

Access World News (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
Search for local newspaper articles about the co.space. Enter co.space in the first search box to get started. After you run the search, use the filters to narrow your results.
Recommended filters:
- Under Source Location, select North America, then USA - Pennsylvania
- Under Source Type, select Newspapers
- Under Language, select English
The electronic editions of record for local, regional, and national U.S. newspapers as well as full-text content of key international sources -- all in one easy-to-search database with a world map. Each provides unique coverage of local and regional news, including companies, politics, sports, industries, cultural activities, and people in the community, as well as a distinctive focus offering a variety of viewpoints on local and world issues. Also includes limited streaming video.

Industry Information

One approach to understanding the industry environment the co.space is operating in is to look at the student housing industry and the housing industry in State College more broadly. This may include looking at Penn State resources on on- and off-campus housing as well as national, state, and local industry reports.

State College Housing Market

Housing Options at Penn State - Penn State Student Affairs

Access World News: College/University Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Search college and university newspapers from around the country (including the Daily Collegian) for articles about student housing.
Search tips:
- Start with a search for housing
- Add additional search terms such as off campus. You may want to try searching for "off campus" (with the quotation marks) or off-campus (with the hyphen) as well
- Trying adding and removing filters as well. If you want to search just Penn State's Daily Collegian, search for Daily Collegian in the Source Name filter menu
This subset of Access World News is a collection of over 580 college/university newspapers with articles related to issues and events, topics and trends at universities across the country.
Centre Daily Times (2018-present) via Access World News This link opens in a new window
Search the Centre Daily Times for articles about the housing market in State College
The Centre Daily Times is available Access World News. Text-only articles are provided from 1995 to current, with full page-image access provided from 2018 to current.
SimplyAnalytics This link opens in a new window
Tool for mapping and creating charts with demographic, socioeconomic, and consumer behavior data. Includes a category of housing-related variables
Limited to 3 concurrent users. SimplyAnalytics enables non-technical users to quickly create professional quality thematic maps and reports using extensive demographic data (ie. census, consumer expenditure data) including estimates and projections, business data from D&B and the County Business Patterns Survey (CBP) and marketing data from EASI/MRI and Claritas PRIZM segments. SimplyAnlytics turns complex data into valuable information that is easily accessed through an innovative and user-friendly interface. Data is available at the State, Congressional District, County, City, ZIP Code, Census Tract and Block Group level in addition to custom trade area and can be exported as images, shapefiles or in tabular formats. Authorized PSU users must "Sign in as a guest" if they do not wish to register for a personal account. Personal accounts save your preferences, reports, and maps.

State College Borough Planning & Zoning Department

Industry Reports

IBISWorld This link opens in a new window
Reports discussing the performance, outlook, and operations of US and global Industries. Business environment profiles covering economic and market conditions forces. Try searching for terms such as rental, apartment, or housing to find industry reports and information on related economic topics
IBISWorld provides over 700 full-text industry reports, 700 US industry risk rating reports, and information on over 8000 Publicly Traded US Companies as well as hundreds of economic and demographic profiles. Subscription includes access to the US Industry State Reports module.

Potentially relevant reports include:

Apartment Rental in the US
Property Management in the US
Real Estate and Rental and Leasing in the US
Apartment Rental in Pennsylvania
Property Management in Pennsylvania
Rental vacancy rates

Search for Articles

You should also try searching for articles from local, national, and international newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Below are some ideas to get you started. Articles can help you identify best practices; opportunities and challenges; and potential initiatives for your client and similar organizations.

Access World News is discussed above and is one place to find newspaper articles, particularly those published in local or regional publications. The databases below cover national and international newspapers, magazines, and trade journals as well as scholarly literature.

ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
Full-text articles from business-focused national and international newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and more
Search a complete database comprising full-text business periodicals and news sources from ABI/INFORM Global, Dateline, and Trade & Industry.
Business Source Premier This link opens in a new window
Full-text articles from business-focused national and international newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and more
An essential article database for business research providing the full text for more than 2,000 periodicals, including about 1,000 scholarly journals. Covers virtually all disciplines in business and economics, including: accounting, economics, econometrics, finance, marketing, management, MIS, QMM and supply chain management.
PsycINFO (via ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Top source for finding scholarly articles in psychology and on related topics. Will be particularly useful if you're focused on mental health
PsycINFO provides access to international literature in psychology and related disciplines. Unrivaled in its depth of psychological coverage and respected worldwide for its high quality, the database is enriched with literature from an array of disciplines related to psychology such as psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work. Nearly all records contain nonevaluative summaries, and all records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.
ERIC (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Scholarly articles in the education field, including higher education. Because college students are one of the populations co.space targets, looking at literature published on that population may be useful. Notably, ERIC provides a filter that allows you to search only for articles focused on a given education level
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the major database for education literature, sponsored by the U.S. Department. of Education. The same database content is available on many platforms.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Search for and access full-text of scholarly articles in sociology and related fields. Particularly useful for searching for articles focused on communities
CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,700 serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Records added after 1974 contain in-depth and nonevaluative abstracts of journal articles.

Search Tips

Using the following search tips in many of the article databases PSU Libraries provide access to will help you find relevant articles more quickly.

Combining search terms:

Use quotation marks (" ") to search for words in a phrase together such as "student housing"
Use the connector AND to find articles that contain both search terms. Ex: "entrepreneurship" AND "student housing" will return only articles that contain both of those terms
Use the connector OR to find articles that contain either search term. Ex: co-living OR "student housing" will return articles that contain at least one of those terms
Use parentheses ( ) to create more complex searches. The database will look for articles that fit the criteria within the parentheses first, then apply the rest of the search string.
- Ex: if you enter ("student housing" OR "co-living") AND entrepreneurship, the search function will first look for any article that contains at least one of the terms "student housing" or "co-living", then look for the term entrepreneurship within those results only

Recommended types of sources/publications:

In databases like ABI/INFORM and Business Source Premier, there's an option to narrow your results to specified types of publications or sources
Recommended source types include:
- Magazines/periodicals - written for the general public. In business, these will include publications like Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek
- Newspapers - written for the general public. Includes publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times
- Trade journals/publications - written for an industry-associated audience
- Scholarly/academic journals - written for a scholarly audience, usually by academic researchers at universities, government agencies, and other organizations engaged in research

Other tips:

Limit your results to articles from the past 3-5 years
If you find an article you're interested in, look for the Subject or Keywords section in the article details to find additional terms to use in searches

Background Resources for Marketing

The following resources, alongside the resources listed above may be helpful in crafting messages that will resonate with the communities you recommend your client target.

Mintel This link opens in a new window
Market research reports analyzing market drivers, trends, market forecasts, market segmentations, demographics, and consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviors. Click on Mintel Reports when you enter the database
Provides access to two products. Mintel Academic publishes 600 market research reports each year for the U.S. and European consumer markets. Reports analyze market drivers, trends, market forecasts, market segmentations, demographics, and consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviors. The Trends module in Mintel Academic tracks cutting edge trends and shifts in consumer behavior. Mintel Market Sizes provides market size, market share and segmentation data for global consumer packaged goods industries. No walk-ins allowed.
eMarketer This link opens in a new window
Data and reports on digital marketing, including information such as how much time demographic groups spend on social media platforms and/or using other types of digital technologies
eMarketer research helps marketers answer three essential questions: how consumers spend their time, how consumers spend their money, and what marketers are doing to reach them. By gathering data from thousands of sources and putting it into context, eMarketer provides the world's top brands, agencies and media companies with the most complete view of digital marketing available. Every report openly references studies and interviews that are handpicked from more than 4,000 research sources. Content is provided in the format of analyst reports, charts, articles, interviews/case studies, PowerPoint presentations, comparative estimates, forecasts, webinars and more. High level topics include: Advertising & Marketing, B2B, Consumers & eCommerce, Demographics, Email, Media Usage, Mobile, Search, Social Media and Video. These topics cut across all industries and geographies.

Penn State University Libraries

MGMT 365: Social Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Librarian