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Removing barriers to innovation – the teaching and learning centre and third spaces
In my last 2 posts ( 7 Rules About Innovation ; First Steps in Creating a Culture of Innovation; I said I’d get to the topic of removing barriers to innovation in an institution. I’m a bit academic about this topic, since I feel like this stage requires some sort of framework that gives your actions some method to the madness. This is also one area where I think senior leadership would do well to be a bit more academic outside of standard leadership literature and practices. But I digress… Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory is probably the most well known and cited tome on innovation, and I’ve found that senior admin really…
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First steps in Creating a culture of innovation in higher education – Figuring out what innovation will mean
In my last post I outlined Tannis’ 7 rules on innovation. I said that the next post would be about removing barriers to innovation, but that’s actually jumping the gun a bit. If you’ve just landed a job with innovation in your job title, the first steps are figuring out what your institution means when they say they want innovation. Find out what people at your institution care about when they say they want innovation. This should be obvious, but chances are different stakeholders (the Deans, the President, the CIO, the faculty) all have different ideas as to what is innovation and what they want. Innovation is a relative construct, and within an…
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About those innovation jobs…7 Rules About Innovation
Today was the latest job posting with innovation in the title, and this one is at a VP level. This seems to be an emerging trend in higher education, suggesting both a desire of institutions to show their commitment to innovation first by including it in their strategic plans, and in addition to that, making sure at least one person in the institution has innovation in their job title. This isn’t a cranky, cynical post about this trend, but it does seem timely to share some observations about what some of institutional barriers to ed tech innovation are, and what can work in overcoming them. For credibility sake, I should mention…
