To establish a more co-ordinated approach to partnership with industry and community organizations, a team from four areas — the Entrepreneurship Practice and Innovation Centre, Research and Innovation Services, Experiential Learning, and the Centre for Continuing Education — whose work has been particularly important to these efforts, will work together to enhance their reach and impact, provost Jeff Berryman has announced.

“Partnerships are fundamental to fulfilling the mission of the University, whether in terms of student learning, innovation and research, knowledge translation, or community service,” he says. “We have an important role to play in connecting people, ideas, and knowledge in our communities: we learn with and from those communities, who challenge us to listen, collaborate, innovate, and evolve.”

The team aims to improve efficiency, engage a greater diversity of students and partners, inspire enterprise and entrepreneurship, and foster increasingly innovative collisions of different ideas, stakeholders, needs, and practices. It will provide a centralized entry point for potential partners seeking to make contact, and encourage students to explore a broader range of experiential learning activities, no matter where they first become interested.

Read more detail in the formal announcement on the provost’s website.