55 SPEC Kit 355: Campus-wide Entrepreneurship
The Blackstone LaunchPad has established a monthly meeting of a cross-campus Entrepreneurship
Roundtable (E-Table), a 45-member group of faculty and staff engaged with entrepreneurship.
Representatives include faculty who teach courses in entrepreneurship and program staff who work
with entrepreneurially minded students. The focus of each meeting is outreach, information sharing,
collaborative event planning, and support for cross-campus entrepreneurial activities. The Business,
Management, and Entrepreneurship Librarian provides instruction and consultation support to
students in the Whitman School of Management, the IVMF EBV and EBV-F programs, and the South
Side Innovation Center (supported by Whitman) Business Planning Course.
The business librarian partners with the College of Business in supporting the Entrepreneurship
Bootcamp for Veterans. She provides instruction, both online and in-person, as well as individualized
research consultations.
The entrepreneurship center, the career center, the community leadership center, related faculty and
curriculum, student clubs and government, the business school
The Kentucky Small Business Development Center: the business librarian supervises a student
researcher. We have also had training sessions for their consultants. We have worked with the
Small Business advisory group SCORE occasionally in the past. They have sent clients to us for
research consultations.
The Libraries is participating with Farley Center for Innovation &Entrepreneurship, NU Corporate
Engagement, Kellogg School of Management (KEIU), McCormick School of Engineering, Medill
School of Journalism, and Integrated Marketing &Communications to support teaching and research.
The library has been involved with Global Entrepreneurship Week for several years. Several librarians
have delivered programming and some events are held in the library.
The PTRC works with the TTO (Technology Transfer Office) to offer patent and trademark education
and services.
There are a number of departments that the library collaborates with in this arena given the expansive
nature of entrepreneurship activities on campus. Some of the more notable or significant partnerships
involve the Business, Arts and Letters, and Communication Arts departments. For example, there have
been many workshops held at the library’s makerspace around things like 3D printing and an MBA
class used our capacity in this area to support a product design class. The Entrepreneurship Librarian
has also played a role in planning and supporting student business plan competitions and student
hackathons in conjunction with the colleges listed above.
U[Tech] (IT department) for digital scholarship
We have coordinated with Tech Ventures, the Economics Department, and the Carey Business School
to jointly acquire selected database subscriptions and educate staff on other available resources. We’ve
coordinated with faculty in the various schools to support classes or programs or provide general
training on resources.
We partner with the Polsky Exchange. They had a pre-existing mentorship program that the Business
&Economics Librarian for Instruction &Outreach joined in order to increase support to members.
Before she started office hours at the Polsky Exchange, there was no formal research support.
We partner with VT Intellectual Property (VTIP) for office hours and workshops and consulting.
We work with the research foundation/tech transfer office. Librarians conduct a workshop every year
for interns in that department. Libraries also refer faculty and staff to that department when they
require help bringing a product to market.
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