.png)
.png)
Going to the next step after, why must universities innovate, I try to look at the ‘How’ of it. In today’s fast-paced world, innovation has become an imperative for universities to thrive. Shifting demographics, rapid technological advancements, and unexpected crises are all crying for a need to innovate. Universities must harness innovation to adapt, evolve, and lead, however, despite this pressing need, the pace of innovation within universities remains disappointingly slow.
We have two distinct states, one normative enshrined in tradition and another, a needed and acknowledged state responsive to the changes around us. For a considerable time, efforts are on to reconcile the two ideas by claiming that there is no antagonism between the two; that the needed state is only a true expression of the normative one. But this awkward co-existence is not yielding much as could be seen from the fact that the question from higher education seems to have not changed much.
What we are trying to do is we are trying to run the universities entirely to a reductionist model where everything is linear, everything works in straight line, everything is proportionate, the opposite of a good idea is wrong, and the past is a fantastic guide to the future.
We are operating in a manner that is similar to how we gauge the prospective students’ intelligence through the entrance tests based on multiple choice questions. Multiple choice questions have a single right answer. Theoretically, you can have multiple right answers, and you simply must choose one that is acceptable. But what you have, is to choose one right answer and discard the three wrong answers. Whether such tests gauge the intelligence of the prospective students or not, is another question for another day.
All such tests are like two buses leave a bus station; one travels due north. The buses are all travelling in a straight line. The examinee is to calculate the time when the buses are a hundred kilometers apart. The question is based on assumption of complete proportionality and linearity and all the information in the question holds the key to the answer.
Reality is radically different. One can have multiple right answers. Most of the time, we don’t have all the information needed to answer the question contained. Some of the information which we have, and think is important, is irrelevant to answering the question as it is derived from the past.
There is a famous experiment which originated in France. A ship stops, 27 goats get on, three sheep get off, then they add 25 cows. How old is the captain of the ship? The intelligent children would not give the answer, it is impossible to tell. They would assume that the information is in the question. While running the universities we do the same. In real life decisions, it is not always the ideal scenario. We do not get the luxury of a single right answer, proportionality, or the scale of the input being proportionate to the scale of the effect. We must learn to embrace uncertainty and be bold in our approach to overcome inertia and spur radical new initiatives.
Open to change
The conventional practices and frameworks of higher education tend to perpetuate gradual, incremental change that ultimately maintains the existing social and disciplinary order, rather than driving transformative innovation.
To remain relevant, universities must be open to change, adaptable to a shifting world, and willing to ask new questions, explore new interactions, and adopt innovative structures. Universities must assume a more proactive role, serving as early warning systems that identify emerging trends, initiate transformative change, and develop solutions to novel problems. The concept of a university, as embodied by Humboldt-University, is rooted in the idea of constant evolution. It is the Humboldtian model that shaped the modern university.
In his book “Robot-Proof,” Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun argues that universities must equip students with skills that complement automation, fostering creativity, invention, and discovery. To achieve this, universities must reimagine education, preparing students for lifelong success in a world of rapid technological change.
A crucial starting point is to prioritize student needs, leveraging data and insights to innovate and improve the learning experience. In teaching, this means supporting students in achieving their goals, identifying talented students not on the narrow metrics of intelligence but across different measures, integrating research into the curriculum, and encouraging students to explore their curiosity and pursue their passions. Universities must prioritize to promote young researchers, funding innovative projects, supporting high-risk, high-reward research, personnel development, fostering social and management competencies among all its members.
A new vision of education cannot be confined within traditional subject structures and degree programs. It is essential to critically reexamine this approach. A university must be rooted in intellectual curiosity and exploration. Therefore, degree structures should be designed to accommodate flexibility, allowing space and time for students to cultivate curiosity, contemplation, and ultimately, novel insights.
Innovative Institution
The ultimate challenge for universities to become a genuinely innovative institution, is to help converge every aspect of the organization to drive novel change, synchronized across all functions, and willing to diverge from traditional paths. It would need to reimagine all the core functions of a university such as how we teach, how we engage with students and faculty, and how we deliver services to our community. An innovative university can embark on profound transformations by thinking of altering its organization structure, processes and practices. To achieve this, strategic leadership and entrepreneurial spirit is essential, enabling the institution to build enabling capabilities, benefit from opportunities and drive meaningful change.
Involving the core community
The pursuit of Innovation transcends beyond transformation and leadership, as it needs novel and imaginative ideas to thrive. Isolated experiments, within university incremental innovations are seen but not many examples are visible where a university has embarked on a bold, institution-wide redesign.
A truly innovative must harness the creative potential of its academic community to envision new futures. Higher education institutions are uniquely positioned to foster innovative thinking, as they bring together diverse faculty, staff, and students to generate and share new knowledge and skills. However, traditional organizational structures and routines constrain this. It is therefore of utmost necessity to overcome these barriers. University leaders must establish cultures and systems that facilitate fluid networks of idea exchange, both within the institution and with external partners. Leaders are required to design and implement structures and routines that support new forms of collaboration and innovation. By doing so, they can unlock the full creative potential of their institutions and drive meaningful change.
Against this requirement what we see is loss of autonomy and judgement. In the urge for quantification guided by budgets, ranking and accreditation requirements, there’s no discretionary judgement allowed anymore because any deviation from this optimum is considered wrong. We all go to work to exercise our humanity which besides economics also includes other things like reason, logic, ethics, and what’s fair. In his book, ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ John Ralston Saul lists six human qualities – common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory and reason. These qualities he argues do not operate in isolation but in tandem with each other. In our
urge for defining problems in an entirely objective manner we have created a kind of capitalistic socialism where we want everyone to dance but with hands and legs tied. Effectively people feel de-humanised like being in a metropolis.
A human brain is quite a lot more nuanced and more sophisticated than the mechanism for decision-making that economists theorize because it must account for imperfect information, variance in outcomes. asymmetrical information, and for imperfect trust. It is evolved to operate in decision making under uncertainty. Yet, most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter are designed for effectively information decision making under certainty.
Technology
Universities must embrace technology to enhance their core mission areas. Technology has demonstrated tremendous potential to revolutionize the learning experience, enabling personalized and engaging education that surpasses traditional methods. It can now make possible learning interventions that we imagined in the past but could not implement due to mass nature of academic delivery. Technology holds tremendous promise for transforming education and research, enabling personalized learning experiences and facilitating collaborative research. Simply acquiring technology is not enough; true innovation depends on how effectively the university leverages technology to achieve its purpose. In other words, the strategic application of technology, rather than the technology itself, is key to innovation in higher education.
