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Category: Innovation

Blue Skies Ahead

Morning everyone. Today is the last blog for a few weeks (though there will be a podcast tomorrow and a Fifteen on Friday). Normal service will resume on September 8th.  For my June send-off, I often paint a pretty solemn “state of PSE” picture. Not gonna lie: 2025-26 has been a bit of a rough year. However, with the exception of British Columbia (sorry guys, you’re pretty much toast), I am pretty sure our sector has already hit bottom in

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June 10, 2026 No Comments

Re: University and the Change Imperative

It’s hard for universities to do things differently. Although they are evidently capable of being flexible and doing somersaults in an emergency (see: COVID), their collective desire for ongoing change is pretty small. It’s a very conservative industry, where isomorphism rules and the most important question to be asked of any change is “do prestigious institutions do it that way”? One consequence of this is that even when it comes to times where universities are under financial pressure and the

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June 3, 2026 No Comments

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

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May 13, 2026 1 Comment

Hidden Factors in Innovation

I want to draw everyone’s attention to an excellent new thesis on innovative universities from the Netherlands. It’s called Success Factors for Innovative Universities by Daryna (Dara) Melnyk, which I think many of you would find a useful read (some of you may remember Dara from when she joined the World of Higher Education podcast back here; you may also be familiar with her own webinar on innovative universities which you can find here). To be clear, Dara’s definition of

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April 29, 2026 1 Comment

The Crux

One of my favourite authors on strategy is Richard Rummelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend to anyone. He has a newish book (2022) out called The Crux which I read a few weeks ago. Today, I want to talk about it in relation to higher education. The thesis of this book, as the name suggests, is that too often strategy does not create an organizational improvement because it does not deal squarely with the key problems that the organization actually

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March 18, 2026 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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