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This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

The purpose of this study was to bring library practitioners and researchers together to develop two co-designed tools for helping library practitioners gain a more holistic understanding of families in underserved groups and identify their values with the goal of developing more relevant learning experiences for them. The co-designed tools were then tested with Master’s of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students at two universities, whose feedback yielded several valuable findings and informed revisions to the tools.

A participatory, design-based approach was used throughout the study, both with engaging library practitioners in the co-design of different tools and processes introduced in the Toolkit, and to help MLIS students and library practitioners test the tools and provide feedback on the tool revisions.

Students indicated that the tools helped them develop a deeper understanding of underserved groups and their values and gave the students the time and space to reflect on their understanding of the socio-cultural and value contexts of their communities and the values they hold.

This study can help libraries more effectively design strengths-based learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to underserved groups and their values, particularly for children and families from underserved communities.