CQUniversity Unit Profile.

Researching strategically relevant business problems is an important part of professional practice and being a successful manager and leader. This is a capstone unit that draws upon your area of specialisation and your wider knowledge of business environments both globally and locally. The unit focuses on developing your ability to undertake independent research that focuses on and contributes to strategic decision making and sustainability in organisations. The unit will improve your skills in synthesising information and developing solutions to improve the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of organisations. You will use research skills to analyse a management problem in your chosen business discipline, identifying strategic challenges, and developing recommendations aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These recommendations will be based on systematic and rigorous analysis of relevant academic literature, professional business information, and publicly available secondary data.

Each 6-credit Postgraduate unit at CQUniversity requires an overall time commitment of an average of 12.5 hours of study per week, making a total of 150 hours for the unit.

This is a graded unit: your overall grade will be calculated from the marks or grades for each assessment task, based on the relative weightings shown in the table above. You must obtain an overall mark for the unit of at least 50%, or an overall grade of 'pass' in order to pass the unit. If any 'pass/fail' tasks are shown in the table above they must also be completed successfully ('pass' grade). You must also meet any minimum mark requirements specified for a particular assessment task, as detailed in the 'assessment task' section (note that in some instances, the minimum mark for a task may be greater than 50%). Consult the University's Grades and Results Policy for more details of interim results and final grades.

Every unit is reviewed for enhancement each year. At the most recent review, the following staff and student feedback items were identified and recommendations were made.

Feedback from Student Unit Evaluation, in-class student feedback, and Unit Coordinator reflection.

Students reported positive perceptions of the unit, with T1 2026 evaluation results ranging from 82.61% to 86.96% across all measures. Feedback was particularly positive regarding clear unit requirements, useful feedback, knowledge and skills, and relevance to the degree. While the overall results were positive, there remains an opportunity to further strengthen student engagement with learning materials and assessment-related learning through interactive and applied learning activities.

Continue providing clear assessment guidance, applied learning activities and contemporary organisational examples to support students in completing the research-focused assessment tasks. Interactive learning tools such as Padlet will continue to be used to encourage student participation, collaborative discussion, sharing of ideas and application of unit concepts. Practical workshops, relevant case examples, online learning resources and industry engagement will also continue to be incorporated to strengthen students’ connection between sustainability concepts, research and real organisational practice.