For weeks, the words “ABM dissertation topic” made my stomach drop. Accounting, business management, marketing, HR — the fields felt so massive that I couldn’t find a single thread to pull. Every time I tried to brainstorm, I ended up with either a topic so vague it meant nothing, or one so narrow I couldn’t find any literature on it. The blank page won every single time.
What slowly changed things for me was admitting that I didn’t need a stroke of genius. I needed a spark. Something small and curious that I could actually see myself working on for months. So I stopped trying to invent a topic from scratch and started looking at what other students had successfully tackled. Not to copy, but to understand the shape of a workable idea.
One of the most helpful things I did was browse a collection of real ABM dissertation topics (you can explore them here: https://premierdissertations.com/abm-dissertation-topics/). I wasn’t looking for a ready-made answer — I was looking for inspiration. I saw topics that mixed HR with technology, marketing with sustainability, and accounting with fintech. Some were surprisingly creative, others were beautifully simple. That hour of browsing gave me something priceless: the confidence that my own quiet curiosities could become a legitimate research project.
After that, I started paying attention to the little ideas that kept coming back to me. A conversation in a seminar, a news article about hybrid work, a debate about ethical supply chains. I jotted them all down without filtering. Most were useless, but a couple stuck. One eventually became my actual dissertation topic, and I never got bored of it — which still feels like a small miracle.
If you’re stuck in that same paralysed place, give yourself permission to explore without pressure. Look at real examples, collect your half-baked thoughts, and talk them through with a friend. Your perfect topic probably won’t arrive fully formed, but with a little curiosity and the right starting point, you’ll find something worth pursuing.