Exploring Twitter use and services of academic innovation centers

This study examined the Twitter streams and websites of 36 university innovation centers and identified 14 service categories the centers offered. Exploring the present Twitter use practices of innovation centers and the services the centers provide can inform the design and planning of service offerings at new innovation centers and support training for center staff in the use of this social media platform. In addition, existing innovation centers can benchmark their service offerings against those services. Furthermore, mapping the services the innovation centers offer to the activities in an innovation workflow model can help center managers optimize the information architecture of their websites and resource guides. In this way, students can easily be informed about the help and resources available for each activity or phase of the innovation process. A comparison of the tweet categories identified in the present study with those of academic libraries assembled in a previous study revealed significant overlap, but some differences as well. In contrast to the Twitter accounts of academic libraries, the Twitter accounts of innovation centers did not tweet about their information services even if they offered them. Innovation centers also did not use Twitter to provide Q&A services to their users. Furthermore, innovation centers tweeted not only about the technological resources they provided, but also about the human resources they recruited to serve as student mentors and advisors. Finally, technology use was more mediated in innovation centers than in libraries, and some centers offered their users fee-based assistance from professionals with their 3D design and printing tasks.