National Entrepreneurship Week 2025
February 17 – 21, 2025 marks National Entrepreneurship Week to celebrate innovation and entrepreneurship. Syracuse University Libraries’ Blackstone LaunchPad is the University’s innovation hub, connecting the campus resource-rich ecosystem with a global network that provides support for aspiring entrepreneurs, inventors and creators. The program serves faculty, staff, students and recent alumni across all disciplines who are interested in entrepreneurship, venture creation and innovation careers. It supports a key pillar of Syracuse University’s academic strategic plan to give students experiential opportunities that help prepare them to be trailblazers in an entrepreneurial world.
As part of our commitment to entrepreneurship, the campus community has access to the Blackstone LaunchPad Entrepreneurship Book Collection guide. There are numerous print books on the shelves outside of the Blackstone LaunchPad on the first floor of Bird Library, but those are only a fraction of what is in the collection.
Here are a few of our Blackstone LaunchPad students’ favorites:
- “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Said Mark Leaf ’27 (College of Engineering and Computer Science), “It teaches you how to delegate tasks and how to spend your time wisely. It really hit home on the 20:80 Rule.”
- “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. Ziekariba Nonr Diallo ’27 (School of Information Studies) said his favorite quote from the book is, “A house you live in is not an asset.”
- “Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do” by Carl J. Schramm. Celes Buffard ’28 (School of Information Studies) favorite quote is, “The difference between those who succeed and those who fail seems, in large measure, to be an individual’s inherent sense of how the innovation process works and how to implement that process. Good ideas take time to appear and be refined. They emerge slowly from what the innovator already knows, reflecting his ability to plug diverse pieces of technology or information together in new ways. Once a new idea has crystallized, it feeds the ongoing synthetic process. Innovation begets innovation. Again, this is why so many entrepreneurs are in their forties when their inspiration comes. Years of exposure to relevant technologies have shown them how innovations unfold from combinations of existing products and processes to make something new. And, once entrepreneurs like this have one good idea, they are more likely to have others.”
