As entrepreneurship becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, librarians can serve an important role in connecting entrepreneurial activities across the university environment. Librarians are developing relationships with faculty, staff, and students in many departments engaged in entrepreneurship, and they also have relationships with publishers of information used by entrepreneurs. These relationships can be leveraged to cultivate an environment where those who teach, study, and engage in entrepreneurship can be connected to the support they need in order for their projects to be successful. This session will focus on collaborations at two universities where librarians worked with a publisher and campus partners to nurture the entrepreneurship environment at each university. The librarian-publisher teams brought together a variety of partners, including the Technology Transfer Office, student organizations, Office of Research and Economic Development, community members, industry professionals, and the schools of engineering, law, and business, to engage in workshops about promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. The challenges, successes, and opportunities related to this type of collaboration will be explored in-depth during this session. Audience members will identify and discuss collaborative entrepreneurship opportunities within their own environments, and they will leave the session with clear strategies for engaging campus, community, and industry partners. The objective of this session is to share strategies used by multiple academic libraries to embed themselves in the entrepreneurial ecosystems of their universities. Through the use of guided discussion questions, the audience will be asked to think about and share current or aspirational partnerships centered around entrepreneurship, and strategies for strengthening or developing those partnerships will be discussed. Attendees will learn how to engage campus, industry, and community stakeholders.
