Anahita Baregheh, Workplace Innovation Research Coordinator and Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business.
Thomas Carey, co-Principal Catalyst for WINCan and Executive-in-Residence in the British Columbia Association of Institutes and Universities and the Monash University Faculty of Arts .
In a January post, we described a proposed project to adapt recent insights from the corporate sector into our higher education context to allow us to systematically sustain strategic innovation in higher education. We’re happy to announce that we have now “officially” launched this project, with an initial case study from Ontario and other institutions in the loop with strong interest expressed in becoming case study institutions and a project schedule from mid-May through December 2020.
This post has a more academic tone than most of our What We’re Learning posts from WINCan projects – complete with footnotes and the traditional academic note about “more research will be needed…” ! That’s because we wrote it as a chapter abstract proposed for a forthcoming volume in the book series Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning.
The new book will be focused on Governance and Management in Higher Education: International Perspectives on Strategic Planning. We’ll be happy to share details of the project plan and schedule with other prospective academic or workplace partners. And we’ll be sharing our interim results in further posts on this topic.
Strategic innovation – also labelled as breakthrough, radical or transformative – leads to new platforms for products or services and to game-changing enterprise models. Often thought of as confined to nimble start-ups, strategic breakthroughs have also been apparent in mature organizations for more than two decades[i]. Systematic, ongoing development of strategic innovations has been shown to be sustainable in leading-edge corporations through new governance and management structures[ii].
Innovation is at least as important for higher education[iii]: increasing reliance on knowledge-intensive work for economic and social development, the growing need for graduates to develop capability in innovation, and the ongoing emergence of new approaches and technologies are all contributing to the need to make innovation a systematic process in higher education.
However, strategic innovation is a recognized challenge for higher education[iv]. In this chapter, we will explore the adaptation of new governance and management structures from successful corporate contexts to meet our higher education needs. The goal of our work is to create a roadmap for sustaining strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.
The chapter will have four components:
A review of our current understanding of strategic innovation in the public sector, with a focus on higher education
A review of the recent advances on sustaining strategic innovation in mature corporations, including these key concepts:
differentiated activities for innovation Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration
managing across Levels of innovation Projects, Platforms and Portfolios
talent development for sustained capability in each Activity and Level
governance through reframing Strategic Innovation as an organizational Function
A mini-case study with an established university, recognized as an innovation leader but not yet “systematically sustaining strategic innovation”. The goal of this mini-case is to analyze the challenges to strategic innovation in current management and governance structures compared with those identified in the corporate sector (e.g., talent development and career paths for personnel in the Strategic Innovation Function).
A case study of the application of these concepts in organizational structure and processes for a new public university in Canada to support a strategic plan to develop innovation capability as a signature graduate attribute. This allows a fuller portrayal of the complexities associated with institutionalizing a Strategic Innovation Function in higher education.
In later follow-on work, we will be integrating the last two components above and developing full Case Studies with our mini-case institution and others. For example, we will be exploring how the roadmap generated for a prospective new university can be adapted to address the further challenges – contextual, structural and cultural – occurring in established institutions.
We will also be addressing a recurring topic of interest across cases and institutions: the potential for a network of institutions to collaborate on governance and management of strategic innovation[v]. This could allow risk and resources in the Discovery and Incubation activities to be shared, with the value generated from these collective activities being exploited separately by each institution through its own Acceleration efforts. (This model has already proven successful in pre-competitive research networks in the corporate sector.)
References:
[i] Leifer, R., O'connor, G. C., & Rice, M. (2001). Implementing radical innovation in mature firms: The role of hubs. Academy of Management Perspectives, 15(3), 102-113.
[ii] O'Connor, G. C., Corbett, A. C., & Peters, L. S. (2018). Beyond the champion: institutionalizing innovation through people. Stanford University Press.
[iii] Tierney, W. G., & Lanford, M. (2016). Conceptualizing innovation in higher education. In Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 1-40). Springer, Cham.
[iv] Relevant references include 1) Andolfi, G. (2016). Development and Innovation Management on Higher Education Institutions. European Journal of Social Sciences Studies. iii) Robinson, C. A. (2017). 2) The Discourse of Disruption: What Can Higher Education Learn from Healthcare Innovation (Doctoral dissertation, National American University). 3) Kozlov, M. (2018). Strategic entrepreneurship-based model of a latecomer university. International Journal of Innovation Science. 4) Thompson, K., Jowallah, R., & Cavanagh, T. B. (2019). “Solve the Big Problems”: Leading Through Strategic Innovation in Blended Teaching and Learning. In Technology Leadership for Innovation in Higher Education IGI Global (pp. 26-48).
[v] Relevant references include 1) Miller, C. E. (2019). Leading Digital Transformation in Higher Education: A Toolkit for Technology Leaders. In Technology Leadership for Innovation in Higher Education (p. 1-25). IGI Global; 2) Kezar, A., et al (2019). The Promise of a “Network of Networks” Strategy to Scale Change. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 51(2), p. 47-54. It is also the focus of Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learning, https://thehailstorm.org/.