My first student 2 business networking conference & recommendations for the future

Flier from the conference

 

So I attended my first Student 2 Business networking conference at the London Convention Centre, March 6, 2013. The conference gave me the opportunity to network and speak about my research interest and listen to business professionals in ICT, Marketing & communication. Basically, from my conversation with a handful of business professionals in these industries, two research questions came up :

1. how can one (a company) make money from social media? and 
2. how can LinkedIn be better exploited as information source and tool for companies and businesses?

Another person even requested of me to send ideas about making an effective viral video that would effectively promote a message to a particular demographic. This is a challenge that I am yet to fully take up, though I am still pondering on some preliminary ideas.

I met no library students at the conference. Only business, computing, art and graphic design students. This was despite the fact that there are potential jobs in the industries represented for librarians.

Since it was the first time that I attended a networking conference, it was a unique learning experience. I learned about networking for jobs in Canada just by observing the Canadian students asking the professionals questions. I also tried my own approach, not really asking questions about the industry, but just sharing my interests to find out who or which company had similar interests.

However, I also received feedback from the business professionals on some of my ideas as well as to what they as outsiders saw as my key strengths: analysis and problem solving .

 

Recommendation

Based on my experience, I have three recommendations:

1. I would like to see Caribbean universities also stage networking conferences for students to network and mingle with employers. I know we have career fairs and mock interviews, but I think we must also teach our students networking skills. I must note however that this student2business conference was not hosted by universities, but more so by an agent or institution of the London municipality. Despite that fact, I feel that universities must also consider the need to teach and give students the practice and the skill of networking, which is a most crucial skill required in today's global world. This is especially important considering the importance of social networks in helping one to get work done as well as to identify opportunities and create innovation.
2. I would like to see separate networking conferences for graduate students from undergrad students. Networking conferences have the potential for being spaces where grad students can share their research /research interests via posters and get feedback from professionals, who could also indicate some of the research questions and problems that they would like answers to. Undergraduate students are primarily interested in getting jobs and/or getting advice about jobs and their fields of interest or industry. As such, when the two are hosted in the same conferences, employers are there primarily with the expectation of finding out who they can hire soon. However, practitioners could also benefit from hearing and networking with graduate researchers, as well as graduate researchers could also benefit from getting feedback about the feasibility of the application of their research in the real world. I think, as such, we need to create such connections that research and practice will converge, and a networking  conference seems to be a place for such connections to occur.
3. LIS schools need to encourage their students to attend such networking conferences to get jobs in places they may not necessarily think about, as well as to promote the profession. It is not good for LIS students to only network among librarians and library employers, but we also need to mingle with businesses, nonprofits and government institutions, who are alternate employers to public and academic libraries. Especially in a time where libraries are facing severe financial and economic constraints, with threats of closure, LIS schools need to start enabling our students to think more about how we can apply our skills in other domains apart from libraries. In addition, LIS schools need to help students learn the same networking skills that business students learn and practice, which can help them get jobs in any field or industry. Hence, we can not afford to isolate our students to talking solely with library professionals, but must also push our students to share what they are learning in library school with persons in other sectors, and get feedback about how what they are learning may be transferrable to jobs outside of traditional librarian jobs.

Young Adult-Owned Business Information Resources for Academic Librariesss

My vision is to see academic libraries provide support for student entrepreneurs to start new businesses. I strongly believe that academic libraries have the existing resources to do so.

Today I went to the Business Library at the Ivey School of Business building and in its reference collection used several resources of value to the small business owner or entrepreneur. There where directories about who buys what; sample business plans, business plan templates, industry profiles and other resources.

I am contemplating collecting a list of resources that academic librarians can use to provide information to students who want to start small businesses.

However, I may first want to make the case for young business owners:

Today, 'more young persons have abandoned traditional corporate career paths in favor of increased autonomy and financial rewards that are possible through entrepreneurship.' Hillstrom, updated by Magee ('Young Entrepreneurs' Organization (YEO)' Encyclopedia of small business / Arsen J. Darnay, Monique D. Magee, editors.3rd ed. Detroit : Thomson Gale, c2007.)

This is evident from a number of articles:

• Muhammad, Tariq K. 'From Buppie to Biz-Wiz: Forget Corporate America - Generation X is Choosing the Entrepreneurial Path to Success." Black Enterprise. January 1997.
• "Entrepreneurial Enthusiasm" Black Enterprise. February 2004 vol 34 #7- p. 32
• Smith. D. (2004, Nov). Students of enterprise. Entrepreneur vol 32 # 11 p. 108 Entrepreneur.com  http://app02.secondact.com/article/73166-3
• "Turn classmates into customers" Black Enterprise vol 33 # 3 October 2002, p. S2.

Some resources that I saw as very useful include:

• For Reference book - Small business sourcebook.(2008). Detroit, Mich. : Gale Research Co.,
• For Periodicals - the Black Enterprise and Entrepreneur magazines.
• For Book - Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating What Matters Most: Building Attitudes, Behaviors and an Action Plan for Success in Your Own Business. - Mary S. Moore (1994). Courage Press

However, as my problem is practically oriented, I have the great challenge of converting this into an academic research proposal.

My research to focus on Student Entrepreneurs

I have decided to narrow my studies to focus on student entrepreneurs and their information needs. This focus emerged from the challenge of studying small businesses, as there are many varieties and flavours of the term. There are competing definitions of small business, as well as the fact that current entrepreneurship recognises that there are various sub categories within small businesses that have special or unique needs and problems. There are Women owned businesses, Mompreneurs and Family businesses to name a few.


The literature of information seeking studies tend to focus on large firms, corporate executives and on managers. My study on the other hand want to zoom in on university or college students and their needs for information. I assume that  university students need information for undertaking entrepreneurship that may be different from other entrepreneurs.

I feel that students are different because they:

1. usually work and study
2. might be on student loan and may be more timid to take a risk to venture into entrepreneurship if they are not sure how they can pay back their student loan
3. are expected by society's traditional norms to get jobs
4. usually have less work/working experience to capitalise on, and 
5. may not have the connections to social capital or other networks needed to establish business

I am going to also focus on how academic libraries can provide information services to help these students meet their information needs.

The first step however in my research proposal for my doctoral dissertation is to first find out what government information services exist online for these student entrepreneurs and potential student entrepreneurs. Does the government provide online information accessible to these students to assist them to launch their businesses and start-ups?

Student entrepreneurship is not new. Many high-tech companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google were all start-ups launched by university students.

Refining my research proposal idea

With some of my minor assignments out of the way, I have now returned to my dissertation topic and proposal. Based on feedback in class and learning about ethics review at FIMS, I am totally scaling down the topic. One of the issues that I am deciding to do is to study documents rather than people in order to escape Ethics board. However today, I became much more closer to identifying who I would study after reading a newspaper article. This I will elaborate on some more in this post.

One of the issues that came up with my research topic was that the definition of small business is very wide, and within contemporary studies of small business owners, there are several typologies and niche groups. I have heard of Women-owned businesses, family-owned businesses, and as of lately - mompreneurs. For the latter, I actuall saw this term in an issue of the Western News here at UWO entitled:  "Exploring the motivations of 'Mompreneurs'" by Paul Mayne published on October 13, 2011. See the link for the article: http://communications.uwo.ca/western_news/stories/2011/October/exploring_the_motivations_of_mompreneurs.html


Today, another newspaper kind of helped me to pick a niche group of small businesses that I think I want to study. This is the group of college students and/or college graduate entrepreneurs. I am not sure what is the right term for them yet and the type of business that they would be classified as. But I do know that I want to narrow my focus these as a user group in need of online business information/library services.

In an article in the London Metro, entitled: "It’s been a pleasure doing business", Vered Ben gives her experience of how she has started 2 businesses during her studies (page 14).  You can also read her story via the link: http://www.metronews.ca/london/learn/article/1019449--it-s-been-a-pleasure-doing-business. In the closing paragraph of her article, Ben states that:

"Most career centres and schools focus a lot on grades, career options and resumes, and usually do not let students think outside the box when it comes to job searching. I think schools should help students see that working for yourself can be a great option."

I believe than more universities are doing exactly that, and will in another post collect some of those articles to demonstrate that point.