Strategic Innovation
Throughout history, institutions of higher education have taken various contingent approaches to planning (campus and facility planning; enrollment planning and academic program planning). These approaches reflected the changing character of the environment and the changing definition of higher education. Until the 1960s, universities were focused on long-range planning; they made use of formal models to understand the organization (rational, bureaucratic, and collegial models). After the 60's, planning models shifted to a more open and politically responsive models.

Between 1975 and 1990, and following Keller's seminal book on university planning (1983), universities started to take a strategic planning approach. The general trend was to reduce and to reallocate. Models that were in fashion viewed universities as decentralized systems, organized anarchies, or matrix models.

Since the late 1990s, universities have understood the reality of the ever-quickening pace of change in the environment, new technologies, growing diversity, and increased globalization and competition. Yet, their approach to planning has not radically changed, despite frequent calls for a more pro-active and flexible planning methodology.

Universities need a more contextual and timely approach to planning. The rigid five-year plan will no longer suffice. As Peterson, a renowned scholar of higher education at the University of Michigan argued, "Planning needs to anticipate macro change approaches that are multilevel and designed to alter external relationships, change internal structures, and incorporate concern for reshaping individual roles and the institution's culture".

What is needed is a more adaptable, year-round planning model with an emphasis on learning and responding—stimulating movement.

We call this approach, strategic innovation. It is a lively and interactive form of responding, whenever the clues and cues in the operating environment alert stakeholders to a need for strategic thinking. Strategic innovation is a responsive form of planning ideally suited to university cultures for it is built on a learning model and depends upon informal networks of stakeholders for its successful implementation.

As another scholar of higher education at the University of South California described, "A strategy is more like a gestalt than a battle plan." Strategies are ideas, or as Mintzberg observed, "...dreams in search of a reality". (Tierney, 1999, p. 148)

Partners for Innovation can help you create reality out of your fondest dreams. We work with you to create a culture that encourages all stakeholders to pay attention to certain "windows of opportunity" for fruitful innovation.