Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
As a sector, higher education is at the low end of innovation rankings. The challenges we face – demographic, technological, political, and pedagogical – will require sustained innovation at a strategic level. Most recently, Josh Kim recommended that higher education look outward for insights on strategic innovation: “Higher education will not figure out its future by only thinking about higher education. We need to look outside academia, and where possible, use these examples to think about our possible higher ed futures.”
To address these challenges by ‘disrupting ourselves’ in higher education, experts in teaching and learning have suggested that lessons learned in the corporate sector could be adapted to the context of higher education teaching and learning. Recent research with Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. has identified exemplars in strategic innovation amongst mature organizations who have institutionalized strategic innovation Beyond the Champion. As noted in our previous WINCan posts about this project, we are exploring whether – and how – we might adapt insights from this corporate sector research to improve and sustain strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.
We constructed two scenario prototypes to explore the potential adaptability and value of insights from the corporate sector for strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning. Each prototype uses insights from the recent corporate sector research on sustaining strategic innovation in mature organizations, adapted to a strategic institutional challenge in higher education teaching and learning. These prototypes serve as Proof-of-Concept tests for the potential value of such adaptation for sustaining strategic innovation and strategic decision making in higher education teaching and learning.
The Greenfields University scenario is a proof-of-concept test to explore adapting insights from the corporate sector to aspects of strategic innovation in a new Canadian public university. The scenario is based on the discussion documents on Academic Strategy for a proposed new public university in the Greater Toronto Area. That planning effort is part of a larger economic and cultural plan for the region and also responds to a call for proposals for Major Capacity Expansion Projects in the province’s university system. The Academic Strategy discussion paper suggests options to address the need for a compelling strategic proposition for exemplary teaching and learning in the proposed startup university.
The key assumption in our fictional Greenfields scenario is a commitment by the institution to include in its operational plans one particular strategic option for exemplary teaching and learning amongst the several described within its current discussion documents: developing Emerging Graduate Attributes in Work and Life, through a Campus as Living Laboratory approach. The scenario prototype first outlined some of the challenges for Greenfields University to initiate and sustain strategic innovation in this area. We then explored the potential adaptation of insights from the corporate sector research to help Greenfields meet its needs in two critical areas of Talent Management for strategic innovation:
Innovation capabilities to be sought in the initial cohort of academic staff
Ongoing professional development and career paths to sustain strategic innovation in teaching and learning
Our second scenario prototype, for a fictional Heartland State University, explores how an established institution with recent successes in strategic innovation might adapt its organizational structures and talent development strategies to sustain ongoing strategic innovation in teaching and learning. The seed content of initial strategic innovation
for this scenario is a network of institutions adapting and extending the innovative Student Transformative Learning Record (“STLR”), created at the University of Central Oklahoma to support students as they develop capabilities for institutional graduate attributes, including Global and Cultural Competence, and, Research, Creative and Scholarly Activities. STLR has won awards for both its integrative approach to assessing and documenting graduate attributes and for its innovative use of technology to support learning.
In our scenario, Heartland State University is a mid-sized comprehensive U.S. public institution with a primarily undergraduate student body, drawing most of its students from within the state (and a growing international clientele). As a member of the STLR Network, Heartland’s current implementation of a STLR-inspired system has provided a recognized leadership position within their state for development and demonstration of graduate attributes.
The scenario assumes that Heartland State is committed to following and benefiting from the ongoing incremental development and dissemination of STLR. In addition, Heartland State has committed to ongoing strategic innovations of its own to sustain its role in exemplary teaching and learning within the state, while leveraging the capabilities, relationships and momentum developed in its STLR innovation adaptation.
In the scenario, Heartland wants to develop the new structures and resources for this extension to its STLR work with the aim of building a foundation and developing capabilities that can be scaled up into future stages and scope of strategic innovation in teaching and learning. Our analysis in the scenario focuses on the Management and Governance issues that Heartland State must address, and how insights from corporate sector exemplars might be adapted to inform and guide the development of this strategic capability
In Part II of this post, we’ll discuss what we’ve learned from constructing and analyzing these two proof-of-concept Scenario Prototypes and our next steps in moving forward with partner institutions to explore further the adaptability and value of corporate sector insights to advance strategic innovation plans and activities for their contexts.