This month’s blog post was contributed by Abbey K. Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University.

This month, I wanted to follow up on our last blog post by highlighting a collection of resources surrounding a specific topic: Business. There are a wide variety of Business OER available today, from case studies and videos to handbooks and textbooks. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on the last example: open textbooks covering specific aspects of business.

Fundamentals of Business, 3rd edition

Adapted by Stephen Skripak and Ron Poff

Overview: This book is intended to serve as a no-cost, instructor-customizable primary text for one-semester undergraduate introductory business courses. It covers the following topics in business: Teamwork; economics; ethics; entrepreneurship; business ownership, management, and leadership; organizational structures and operations management; human resources and motivating employees; managing in labor union contexts; marketing and pricing strategy; hospitality and tourism, accounting and finance, and personal finances.

What I enjoyed most about this book was its basic overview of business concepts and its integration of clear examples, graphics, and H5P exercises throughout. The content is broken up into manageable sections and major terms and concepts are bolded. Chapter 8, “Management and Leadership,” provides a particularly good example of this book’s strengths in action.

Leading Innovation

By Kerri Shields

Overview: This book introduces business innovation, from incremental innovation such as enhancing the performance of an existing product, service, or process, to radical or disruptive innovation such as one that has a significant impact on a market. The content examines how leaders foster a culture of innovation, how companies turn creativity into innovation, and how innovation transforms not only organizations but economies as well.

Leading Innovation is the newest book on this list, having been released in March of 2022. Although relatively short, this guide to business innovation is attractive and well-organized, with key takeaways and exercises at the end of each chapter. Chapter 5, “Sustainable Innovation,” was a favorite of mine for its inclusion of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

Customer Centric Strategy

By Kerri Shields

Overview: Customer centricity is about organizational transformation making the customer the focus for business decisions, processes, product development, services, and procedures. Some companies purport to be customer centric but they fall short in connecting this concept throughout all functional areas of the business.  While it is important to offer superb customer service, being customer centric is far more than that.  It’s about mapping the customer journey to discover customer needs and wants, what’s working and what is not, then taking action to improve the customer experience.

The second book by Kerri Shields on this list, Customer Centric Strategy is a unique open textbook, focusing on a specific aspect of business practice. Similar to Leading Innovation, this book includes key takeaways and exercises at the end of each chapter, along with additional resources for learners who want to explore a topic in more depth. Chapter 7, “Designing Products, Services, and Processes with Customers in Mind,” could be the premise for an entire course if expanded, but seeing it broken down to its broad components and explained simply here was refreshing. I’d recommend this book both as a standalone resource for courses exploring customer service work and as a supplementary review tool for higher level business courses.

Essentials of Project Management

By Adam Farag

Overview: The Essentials of Project Management is designed specifically for college students enrolled in a business program including business accounting, administration, supply chain and human resources. It describes the project management process and the role of the project manager in implementing such a process. The book is designed to help students build understanding of the importance and applications of project management.

The final book on our list this month is broader in scope than the last two, though more focused than the introduction to business text that we used to start off this list. The chapters are broken into subsections, each including the learning objectives, chapter content, a case study, and review questions. I particularly enjoyed seeing the case study in chapter 6, “Wedding Event for Cy’s Catering,” as it was adapting a case study (Financial Management: The Case of a Wedding) first developed at Iowa State University by an Apparel, Events, and Hospitality Management professor.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short dive into a few resources available for business courses interested in OER! There are many more available online, but I hope these textbooks have given you something to look forward to as you search for items you might use in your courses.