Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
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
There are numerous ways of categorizing innovation, for example on the basis of the nature of innovation, such as product, service or process innovation, or the degree of change it introduces to the organization such as incremental or radical. Organizational innovation can also be characterized on the basis of the impact it will make to the organization and the market. If the innovation is developed to support an organization’s long- term strategic intent, or if it supports differentiated excellence and competitive advantage, then the innovation development is strategic for the organization. For example, in Canada the University of Waterloo established a distinctive strategic position in teaching and learning as an early leader in work-integrated learning.
In previous posts about this project, we have summarized insights from research in the corporate sector which could be adapted to advance strategic innovation in higher education and outlined our creation of scenario prototypes for two university cases as initial tests of potential value created from such adaptations. In the Greenfields University scenario, we explored the organizational structures and talent development strategies required to support a start-up public university in its commitment to sustain strategic innovation in teaching and learning.
In the Heartland State University scenario, we explored how an established institution with recent successes in strategic innovation might adapt its organizational structures and talent development strategies to sustain further strategic innovation. By looking at specific challenges faced by these institutions, the scenarios served as proof of concept tests that demonstrated how adapting insights from the corporate sector can illuminate possible paths forward to sustain strategic innovation in higher education.
What have we learned?
Here are some highlights from what we learned in the process of creating and analyzing these scenarios as a proof-of-concept tests. Some of the research insights from the corporate sector that we had expected to be useful did provide value in the scenarios, at times in surprising ways. Other research insights did not align with the context of the scenario institutions, although we noted other contexts where they might contribute value. We’ll focus here on the issues in Talent Management for Strategic Innovation which emerged in the scenarios; important insights also arose in the broader area of Governance and Management of Strategic Innovation.
One of the surprises that occurred in the Greenfields scenario was the immediate Talent Management focus on recruiting a cohort of new faculty and academic support staff to lead innovation in one of the institution’s strategic directions. The corporate sector research had identified three different capabilities focusing on the sequence of Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration activities for strategic innovation. In the scenario, the three opportunity domains that the university wanted to explore as graduate attributes – Digital Transformation, Workplace Innovation and Sustainability – were at different stages of development within higher education as a result their recruiting effort shifted from looking for “innovators” to more specific and differentiated capabilities suited to each of the opportunities to be explored.
Another Talent Management issue – which arose in both university scenarios – was the need for ongoing professional development and career pathways for faculty and staff with major responsibilities focused on innovation in teaching and learning. Here the impact from the corporate sector insights aligned with our expectations. Suggested career pathways included:
senior “Innovation Fellow” roles within a particular activity type like Incubation,
moving within an opportunity domain as promising concepts moved from Discovery through Incubation to Acceleration, and
·taking on broad responsibility for Innovation such as moving from project level to oversight of innovation projects in an opportunity domain and potential progression to emerging senior roles such as Chief Innovation Officer.
Each of these career pathways will require development of new capabilities. For example, taking on broader responsibilities in innovation management will require the capability “to understand the micro, the meso and the macro levels of learning innovation” (as noted in a recent book on Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education).
A final Talent Management issue is the need for coaching and support roles to help the innovation teams get better in their assigned roles (and ultimately to “get better at getting better”). This was one of the points in our scenario study where the Network of Networks approach used in advancing teaching and learning in higher education emerged as an attractive organizational structure to advance and support strategic innovation. While neither of the scenario institutions had the critical mass of innovation activity to justify a full complement of coaching and support roles, sharing these resources within a collaborative network could make this feasible for small to mid-size institutions.
A network of institutions engaging with strategic innovation would also be a way to share the risk and rewards of the Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration capabilities required to extend our understanding of strategic innovation in higher education and to sustain and document the resulting value creation. We can see the beginnings of such innovation support networks in system-wide offices for Academic Innovation – e.g., the University System of Maryland’s Kirwin Center – and in emerging collaborations such as Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learning).
Where do we go from here?
Our planned next step with the existing scenarios is to conduct Walkthroughs with senior administrators from the institutions which served as seeds for the scenarios and/or institutions of similar size and complexity. We also have expressions of interest from larger and more complex institutions, to explore how we can develop testable scenarios of the adaptability of corporate sector insights to support aspects of their strategic innovation plans and activities.