The Problem(s) with Innovation

The key may be that last word: visibility. We want innovation to be noticed enough to get resourced, to get attention, eventually to get scaled up.

Carlson's Law

In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.

As a result the sweet spot for innovation today is "moving down," closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

The Law

The Need

Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI International

What Steve Jobs was looking at was a host of problems: the burst dot.com bubble, an economic downturn, widespread disappointment n the promise of the Web, technology generally. Think what's happened since then.

What higher ed is facing is a host of problems just as formidable: depleted funding, downturning enrollments. flat-lining completion, a fast-changing job market, faster-changing technology, etc., etc.

"The way we’re going to survive is to innovate our way out of this"

-- Steve Jobs to Time in 2002

Spaces for Collaboration

The Tension(s)

Innovation vs. Resource Management

Means of Surfacing Innovations

The Answer

In a word...

not really centralization vs. decentralization but consolidation vs. distribution (differently located and motivated practices or behaviors)

The Moment

• Innovation is risk-taking
• Resource management is essentially risk management

What’s fascinating about our point in time is that we have reached a moment when, for all sorts of reasons (fiscal, social, structural), the most dangerous thing you can do is play it safe

The Response

It’s precisely because it's too risky not to take risks that you see all sorts of odd behavior from and disruptive interventions around higher education — MOOCs, competency-based credit, corporate partnerships, etc.

"Innovation

Exhaustion"*

*a term coined by Dan Greenstein of the Gates Foundation in noting that “innovation exhaustion comes out in an obvious and growing frustration with MOOCs.”

The Question

The (Goldilocks) Point

When getting to the crux of this tension, only one of the journalistic questions helps, really. (The rest are about getting into the blame game, if not the weeds.)

Innovation is risk-taking

The Problem(s) with Innovation

and some steps toward solution(s)

George Otte

University Director of Academic Technology