Abstract
The Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver has shown resilience in navigating an increasingly turbulent environment. In working to transform itself, while still performing current activities, the College has pursued ambidexterity. That is, it has exploited its existing capabilities to deliver traditional academic programs and activities, while exploring new capabilities, academic programs, and activities that will help position the school for future growth. This effort started with revisions in the College’s strategy, structure, and mission, which were then followed by several operational changes. The depth and process of these changes are illustrated in the discussion of three significant initiatives: a focus on challenge-driven education, the launching of an online MBA, and the commencement of an executive PhD program. These changes have impacted enrollment as well as the College’s ability to consider and implement additional changes.
Resilience and transformation increasingly represent the norm for most higher education institutions. As higher education faces questions about continual increases in tuition costs and the perceived value of a college degree, universities and colleges must explore new options for attracting and retaining students, delivering programs more effectively and efficiently, and engaging with external stakeholders. Such exploration must be conducted while simultaneously working to provide the historical benefits that have been promised students, parents, communities, and society. Thus, colleges and universities need to show resilience in responding to and growing from the challenges they face while at the same time transforming themselves. The situation for the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver (DU) is no different. As a private university dependent upon tuition dollars for its operations, we have sought to increase our level of ambidexterity (Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996). Ambidexterity is when an organization simultaneously pursues both incremental and radical innovation, exploiting existing resources and capabilities while exploring new ones. Ideally, in pursuing both types of innovation, the organization “does not have to escape the past . . . to renew itself for the future” (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2004: 75). We are actively seeking ways to exploit our existing capability of delivering a high-touch, personalized experience to undergraduate and graduate students in our traditional programs, while exploring new programs and developing new skills to meet the changing higher educational demands.
Context
The University of Denver was founded in 1864 as the Colorado Seminary, before Colorado had even become a state. The following year the University changed its name to the University of Denver and broke off formal religious ties. Over the subsequent 150 plus years, the University has had its share of ups and downs and currently finds itself generally well-positioned to face some of the aforementioned challenges (for an overview of the University and the College, please see the quick facts in Table 1).
Quick facts about University of Denver and Daniels College of Business.
Note. AACSB = Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business; MBA = Master of Business Administration.
There are, however, two notable forces affecting the business school as we prepare to move to the next stage of development.
Dependency on Enrollments
As a private institution that primarily relies upon tuition to cover its expenses, student enrollments are critical for paying our current expenses and funding any new, exploratory efforts. Without an increase in enrollment—or tuition—the ability to grow the University is limited. Unfortunately, as has been reported in popular press, students who have accrued debt pursuing an undergraduate degree are not as willing as they once were to take on additional debt for a graduate degree. This has led to enrollment stagnation. While increases in international students provided temporary, additional enrollments, the number of international students enrolling in business school has also declined over the last few years. The College has to find ways to attract new students.
Single Location
Currently, the College primarily offers courses on our campus in Denver. While there are online courses and a few online programs, most students must be in the Denver area to attend classes. The regional nature of our University means that we are sometimes limited in our ability to draw students from other parts of the country or from other countries, when compared to more internationally known business schools. There are, however, several advantages to being in Denver. The College has a strong reputation in the local market, with many of our alumni running or working in local businesses. Furthermore, the growth of the local economy means that new businesses and employees are moving to Denver. These two attributes combine to give the College the opportunity to work with a local, vibrant community. Moving forward, we need to take advantage of these conditions, while also reaching out beyond the region.
Toward Greater Resilience and Transformation
Like most business schools, Daniels has repeatedly responded to environmental challenges and opportunities over the course of its lifetime. A recent decline in our graduate enrollments brought about the impetus to consider more radical changes. In our current context, we realized we could not cut our way to growth and had to explore significantly new programs. Our effort was aided by hiring an external candidate, Brent Chrite, as the new dean in 2014. With his outsider’s perspective and encouragement to change, we have revised our strategic vision and mission statements, and defined four new strategic initiatives. The new vision and mission statements, listed in Table 2, reflect our desire to engage a broader set of stakeholders (e.g., lifelong learners), to engage them differently (e.g., experiential learning), and to focus on creating a greater impact (e.g., for the public good).
Daniels College’s vision and mission statements.
This new strategic vision and mission were followed by the development of four core priorities for our strategic plan, where we strive to create: (a) an unrivaled student experience, (b) market connectivity; (c) impactful research; and (d) programmatic portfolio innovation. Our faculty’s approval of the strategic plan coincided with and complemented a new strategic plan subsequently approved by the University.
Consistent with an ambidextrous approach, approval of the College’s strategic plan in 2015 led us to make both incremental operational and programmatic changes as well as more radical ones. The incremental changes were needed to upgrade existing programs and appeal to current students. These changes were part of maintaining our past and exploiting current capabilities. Other initiatives, however, pursued more significant changes, as we strove for transformation and resilience. Over the course of the next 3 years, the process of developing these broader initiatives required significant faculty and staff leadership to balance the exploration with our existing operations. For each proposed substantive change, faculty-led committees, which included senior staff as members, were engaged from the beginning of the process. While there was typically strong, general support for considering a particular change, each initiative required substantial time and effort to move from idea to implementation. The committee of faculty and staff organized to investigate each initiative usually met regularly over several months, to ideate, to collect data, to receive feedback, and to build broader, College-level support. Feedback sessions involved a variety of formats, including committee meetings, focus groups with internal and external stakeholders, workshops, open-house forums, and formal presentations. While the investment was considerable, it was necessary to vet the ideas and to achieve the required level of commitment, including formal faculty approval. Beyond the leadership and commitment by faculty and staff, we also modified organizational operations to accommodate new programs. These structural changes, in terms of new positions, new hires, and new offices, served to not only signal a commitment to these particular changes but also help communicate the College’s intended effort to continue to learn and grow. Thus, they signaled sustained resilience by the College as it continues to transform itself. To illustrate these changes, it is worth describing three notable initiatives: our focus on challenge-driven education, our MBA@Denver online degree program, and our Executive PhD program.
Challenge-Driven Education
In rethinking the program offerings for our students, a College-wide task force of faculty and staff worked to redesign our full-time MBA. The program that resulted from a redesign process that spanned many months made experiential, real-world challenges the primary organizing unit rather than courses. While we, like many business schools, had for many years used live projects or experiential learning in select courses, the proposed program was much more extensive. In the revised MBA, launched in fall 2016 and rebranded to be called the Denver MBA, students primarily focus each quarter on completing a project, for which they learn about a problem, meet with a company that has the problem, and at the end, make recommendations to the company on how to address the issue. While working on the project, the students take courses necessary to conduct the project. Each quarter, the students take on a different challenge. In the first quarter, the students focus on a start-up, ideation challenge, building the fundamental knowledge needed to start a new enterprise. This is followed in the second quarter with a social impact challenge, where the students consult to a nonprofit organization, and then, in the third quarter they help a corporate client. In the second year, the students engage in a global challenge where they travel internationally and work for 1 to 2 weeks on a problem facing a company in a foreign market. This challenge-based approach to the curriculum represents a transformation of our on-campus MBA program and required faculty and staff to rethink curricula and student engagement. Some of the changes include incentivizing faculty to engage in course development, hiring new staff, needing to scope out projects with the companies, changing course pedagogy to complement the requirements of the challenge, and spending much more time outside the classroom working with students on their projects. Beyond creating this program, this transformation had two additional effects. First, the focus on challenge-driven education has impacted our other programs, as real-world challenges are used to varying degrees in Master of Science programs as well as in undergraduate majors and minors programs. Second, the concerted effort surrounding this change conditioned the College to be open to and to consider making additional changes,
MBA@Denver
Recognizing that many students are no longer able to or interested in coming to campus twice a week to attend face-to-face classes, we began an online MBA degree in January 2018. Targeting professional, working students, we partnered with the company 2U to develop the courses, market the program, and attract the students. The approach proposed by the company fits well with our focus on a classroom experience that affords a high degree of interaction between faculty and students. In this model, while students engage in asynchronous material—for example, short videos created by a faculty member, activities designed for the students to engage with one another—each week there is a synchronous session where approximately 15 students meet online with a session lead who facilitates a discussion of the week’s materials. This effort required exploration as this is our first, College-wide, online effort. As such, it involved University-level approval for the partnership with 2U—forged in conjunction with DU’s Graduate School of Social Work, which concurrently launched a Master of Social Work with the company—as well as approval for the new degree, and the training of many faculty in online teaching. It has also required the dedication of staff time to initiate and implement the program, and the commitment of the faculty to develop new courses and teach them as overload, all while delivering our on-campus programs. This program has been transformative as we start expanding upon our online offerings in other degree programs.
Executive PhD
Focusing our attention on another, new target audience, we admitted our first class of Executive PhD students in fall 2018. This small, but elite, initial cohort of 18 students commenced on a 3-year, executive education format for obtaining a PhD. Modeled after Executive DBA and Executive PhD programs that are becoming more common, this hybrid program will generally have the students come to campus for two weekends per quarter and meet online in the interim weeks. The student will take a common core of classes—for example, basic theory and methods—before specializing in specific areas (e.g., accounting, finance, leadership, marketing, real estate and construction management, strategic management) for research projects and, eventually, a dissertation. This effort is transformative for us because it will bring in a new type of student to the College: one who is typically 10 years beyond a master degree. Furthermore, as many of the students are likely to use data from their companies in their research projects and dissertations, we anticipate the research will be more grounded in real-world applications than some traditional doctoral dissertations. This program will help the College progress toward its goal of improving its research. Similar to the MBA@Denver initiative, faculty commitment to the Executive PhD program involves developing and teaching new courses on an overload basis, all the while striving to continue to provide high-quality, on-campus courses.
Outcomes of Change
As noted, these three initiatives represent exploratory efforts at transforming the College, as well as resilience by our faculty and staff as we address the challenges that face higher education in general, and colleges of business in particular. The impact of these three efforts has been multi-dimensional. These programs focused on improving the economic and reputational status of the College, and were enabled by technological innovations such as online technology. The three programs overall have improved our graduate enrollments, although some have been more successful than others. They have also been valuable in signaling to key stakeholders (e.g., potential students, employers, prospective faculty members) the types of innovations we are pursuing within the College. Finally, as noted above and as discussed by Kovoor-Misra (2020), these changes help create a positive cycle of transformation as the capacity for change increases and leads to enhanced resilience. Some of the additional changes were that the College hired many new staff members (and created roles that did not exist 4 years ago—e.g., Director of Global Experiential Operations, Career Coach), restructured administrative departments, and redesigned several of our master of science programs. For example, we created an MS in Real Estate and the Built Environment to replace the MS in Real Estate & Construction Management and launched an MS in Applied Quantitative Finance to replace our MS in Finance. We also appointed many new faculty members. More than 40% of our faculty have been here less than 5 years and almost 60% less than 8 years. Managing these changes has involved the considerable, and sometime delicate, effort of combining new perspectives, a willingness to change, and the respect for the College’s traditions supplied by the longer tenured individuals, to pursue our goal of ambidexterity. Taken together, these efforts have had a positive impact on the College, as evidenced by the creation of the programs, the application of insights from these experiences elsewhere in the College, and the increase in enrollments. While some of these changes reflect our particular situation, as a private university with a single location and reliant upon tuition, we anticipate that the general lessons of managing ambidexterity will extend to other universities’ contexts.
Future Efforts
Looking ahead, we expect to continue to learn from and build upon these changes and continue to transform the College. For example, most of the above changes were conducted with approval and support from and coordination with the University as a whole, but were mostly internal to the business school. This intra-college focus permitted a certain speed and agility in responding to the opportunities, but in the near future we intend to pursue interdisciplinary degree programs with other colleges on campus (e.g., Engineering, Social Work, International Relations, Law, University College—the Univerity’s continuing education college). We also plan to continue to explore new teaching approaches as we strive for more flexible delivery formats—for example, on-demand, off-campus, online—that will allow students to take courses from us but not necessarily require them to be on campus at regularly scheduled times. Furthermore, we will challenge ourselves in delivering courses using pedagogical approaches that appeal to prospective students who seek hands-on, engaged, and interdisciplinary learning. The goal is to integrate these once exploratory efforts into our traditional efforts, as we then explore even newer opportunities.
In short, like most business colleges, we have a history of making transformations and showing resilience. We have had to, to last over 100 years. But as the pace and scale of environmental changes increase, we know we will need to balance exploitation and exploration if we are to transform ourselves even more and survive in the long term.
Coda
After the initial writing of this article, Dean Brent Chrite announced he would leave the Dean’s position after the current academic year. As transformations and resilience are organizational properties and do not reside in just one person, the growth and enhanced competitiveness efforts are expected to continue, led by the faculty, staff, and a new dean.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
