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 “innovative universities” in this these is a bit different from the way that term is used in Canada. What we tend to mean by the term is “institutions which follow existing models (e.g. “research universities”, “Liberal Arts schools”) but do try new things occasionally, have a positive view of change, and generally attempt to avoid ossification”. What Dara is looking at, instead, are institutions which break the mould and try new models of education and research which then either spread or are widely admired. The three case studies in this thesis are the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, the Asian Women’s University in Bangladesh, and African Leadership University in Mauritius/Rwanda. If you were going to draw up a list of similarly path-breaking universities for Canada, you’d have a hard time making the list longer than i) the University of Waterloo and ii) Quest University (RIP – not all innovations succeed!).
But still, even if you just want your institution merely to avoid ossification/encourage experimentation – and if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I assume that includes you – there is a lot that can be learned from this paper. What I like about it especially is that while it does find some useful evidence that the classic ideas about higher education leadership do sometimes have resonance (leadership, organizational sagas), it digs a whole lot deeper and comes up with some pretty interesting observations about what makes innovation spread within and across institutions. I want to talk about three “little” observations – mainly from her Maastricht case study (the example that is organizationally most similar to Canadian universities) – which I think are pretty sharp.
The first observation – which I think is pretty well understood by most people in the system but perhaps not as often recognized by the management literature – is that decentralization is one of the biggest barriers to institutional innovation. This is a bit paradoxical because in business and politics we often talk about innovation happening at small-scale and then scaling (provinces/states as “laboratories of federalism”, etc.) But this simply isn’t true in universities. Smallness and the spread of innovation really only works if one and preferably two of the following conditions are at work: i) the units are competing with one another, and/or ii) the units are paying attention to each other. But neither of those is reliably true across university departments. Universities are more like big ugly 1970s-style conglomerates: happily protected from competition with one another, and no compelling reason to look elsewhere for innovation. So, one part of the university might do something absolutely ground-breaking (e.g. McMaster’s Medical faculty coming up with Problem-Based Learning) and have zero impact on any other faculty within the university, even if the idea spreads around the world from one medical school to the next. Why? Decentralization.
(An aside: if someone at McMaster had bothered to spread PBL to other disciplines when it was first introduced 60 years ago, McMaster’s profile would be far more distinctive than it is today. More like Waterloo, in fact, except that profile would be laid upon a much broader strength in STEM and medicine. That’s the price you pay for decentralization)
The second observation has to do with the internal discourse about change happens – in effect, the factors that lead to an internal culture which is receptive to change. At Maastricht, she pinpoints the role of Observant, an independent weekly magazine published by the university. These are pretty common at Dutch universities – DUB at Utrecht, Mare at Leiden – and they are genuine community resources with a high degree of professionalism and independence from University Management. Through their reporting on the community and the issues facing it, these publications provide an important platform not just for new proposals to get wide readership and understanding, but also for the entire community to debate and discuss new issues. Basically: if you want to build support for anything in an institution you need an “interested public”, and it’s a lot easier to create and maintain such a public if there is an independent source of information (emails from the Provost’s office don’t count) which also functions as a platform for discussion. Journalism works, folks!
The third interesting observation, I thought, had to do with the desirability of universities to have a dedicated innovation unit. It’s nice – maybe ideal – if innovation bubbles up from the bottom. But it’s not reliable. You can’t count on it to actually deliver results, partly because people are often skittish about change, but also because those people who are interested in change are often busy with a lot of other stuff, too, and so can’t devote themselves to change.
But what if you had a specific unit that was devoted to change? Administrative change, yes, to try to keep costs down and services nimble. But also, pedagogical change, curricular change, technological upgrading, a unit devoted to keeping program offerings fresh? Not a unit that would bulldoze academics into working in new ways in new programs, but rather one devoted simply to planting seeds for change across an institution, and helping the ones that take root to grow faster? And perhaps even…measuring the results? It’s an intriguing idea.
I should be clear that I am not doing Dara’s thesis justice here: it’s a meditation on deep innovation in higher education, and I am just excerpting the bits that I think might have greatest relevance to the majority of Canadian institutions who don’t want to break the mould but do want to a better job of staying fresh and relevant. Read the whole thing if you’re interested in more systematically innovative institutions.
But I do have an ulterior motive for highlighting this work; namely, that Dara is joining Higher Education Strategy Associates as our head of Global Engagement this week. We’re looking forward to her playing a big role in opening new markets overseas, developing executive education offerings, helping our clients meet their goals of becoming nimbler and more innovative, and of course, contributing to our free, public-facing work. Dara is a big and welcome addition to our team, and I think you will all enjoy getting to know her.
