DOI: 10.11648/j.ijsmit.20261201.12 ISSN: 2575-5110

Entrepreneurship Skills and Venture Creation in University Libraries in South-West, Nigeria

Maria Ilori, Ezinwanyi Madukoma, Obina Okoro
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University libraries are increasingly required to adopt entrepreneurial approaches to enhance service delivery and contribute to institutional sustainability amid declining funding and rising operational demands. This study examined entrepreneurship skills and venture creation in university libraries in South-West Nigeria. Adopting a survey research design, the study employed a total enumeration approach covering 314 librarians from 18 selected federal, state, and private universities, of which 279 valid responses were analyzed. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire and analyzed with descriptive statistics and simple linear regression at the 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that librarians possess a generally high level of entrepreneurship skills, particularly in leadership, opportunity recognition, innovation, and creativity, though gaps exist in risk management and user-centred innovationh. The study further established that university libraries are actively progressing through different phases of venture creation, with the fully developed phase showing the strongest performance in terms of operational efficiency and sustained growth. Archiving and digitization services emerged as the most prevalent ventures, while other income-generating initiatives such as publishing, consultancy, and infopreneurship remain underutilized. Regression results indicated that entrepreneurship skills have a significant positive influence on venture creation (β = 0.343, p < 0.001). The study concludes that strengthening librarians’ entrepreneurial competencies is critical for diversifying ventures and repositioning university libraries as strategic contributors to institutional development and revenue generation.

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