A white woman in a black dress addresses a crowd on a stage at U of T's Accelerator Fest. A slide show projected behind her shares information about a new web app. — U of T's Accelerator Fest showcases business ventures from across the university community.

Published: November 25, 2024
By: Alison Lang, UTL News

If you’re looking to start your own business or startup, there are few places better than the University of Toronto. Over the past decade, a vast network of workshops, courses, accelerators and funding opportunities have sprouted across all three campuses, and they’re all geared towards supporting students, staff and faculty looking to start, build or sustain a new venture.

There’s one critical point, however, that might not immediately be top of mind for a budding (or even seasoned) entrepreneur: how does one find the most reliable information, statistics and market research to provide the foundational support for a new venture? This is where UTL’s entrepreneurship librarian Carey Toane comes in – and she’s here to help.

“What start-ups want most from the library is market research, regardless of their technology or subject area of expertise, and it’s my job to help them find it,” says Toane, who is based out of the Gerstein Science Information Centre. “Entrepreneurship is often about risk, and information can help minimize that risk by suggesting the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”

Research and writing have been a part of Toane’s life since her undergrad years, where she studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. After working as a staff writer at a marketing trade publication in Canada, she moved to Finland to copywrite for Nokia’s digital agency and then a small mobile startup launched by that company’s former head of design. She also completed a master’s degree in English philology at University of Helsinki and started writing poetry.

A white woman with short dark hair, a striped shirt and blue jeans stands on a mountain in Drumheller, Alberta.

Upon returning to Toronto, Toane got involved in the poetry community and began hosting a reading series. There she encountered librarians who loved their work, and realized librarianship might be the ideal occupation to connect the many diverse skills she’d cultivated through the years.

“As a journalist I loved doing deeper research, which is something I never felt I had enough time for – I loved going into the archives and digging up material around things like advertising in Canada,” Toane recalls. “I was very interested in aspects of academic librarianship, like conducting my own original research while also being engaged in community and working with students.”

Toane got her MLIS degree at Western University in 2012 and then worked there and at York University as a business librarian before joining UTL in 2015. At that time, the concept of an entrepreneurship librarian was a relatively new one, and Toane found ample opportunities to build and define her role from the ground up. Her early work involved making connections with U of T’s accelerator community and surveying campus entrepreneurs to understand their information habits and needs.

Now, almost a decade later, entrepreneurship at U of T is thriving, and Toane works with U of T’s diverse array of student and faculty entrepreneurs through a variety of touchpoints. You can book a consultation with Toane or her fellow entrepreneurship librarians at UTM or UTSC, or sign up for an entrepreneurship research skills workshop, with topics focused on market research strategies and tools, resources for patents research, or an intro to entrepreneurship on campus.

For Toane, as with most librarians across disciplines, information literacy lies at the core of her work. This is particularly important when working with new entrepreneurs, many of whom are trying to bridge the gap between the two very different worlds of academic and market research.

“The experience of doing business research can feel very wild west,” Toane says. “It can feel like the guardrails of research are missing. That’s when critical information literacy becomes very important. Even on a pitch deck, citing a report from a respected source will show that you can critically evaluate information. That is a very important skill that employers and investors want to see.”

As if she’s not busy enough, Toane also manages the 3D-printing studio located in the MADLab at Gerstein, providing training sessions, supporting prototyping assignments, and creating teaching materials. A recent project included adapting 3D object files to mimic the function of ball and socket joints for a Faculty of Kinesiology anatomy course.

A display of colourful projects created on a 3D Printer is spread across a table, including a Yoda, snakes, lizards, a dinosaur skull and a bunny rabbit.

For Toane, the connection between the 3D projects and her entrepreneurship work is problem-solving – and working with students and faculty across a broad range of disciplines who are engaged in experiential learning or applied research.

“I get to work with the most motivated students – it’s such a pleasure, meeting students who are putting their precious spare time to use solving a problem or making the world better somehow,” Toane says. “Regardless of whether they start a company or not, or whether that company is successful - my job is to help people build up skills that will inform good decision making in the long term. I feel very lucky that I get to do that.”

To learn more about how to build research skills to support your venture, visit the UTL Entrepreneurship site, where you can peruse the entrepreneurship guide, book a consultation or sign up for a workshop.

From the stacks to startups: Carey Toane and the business of librarianship