The Idea of the University as Incubator

We have been advised for some time now—even before the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed an existential crisis for many institutions—that universities, in order to withstand the economic, demographic, and other challenges they face, must continually innovate. Philip Rogers, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, says that the future success of university presidents will depend “on their ability to reinvent themselves and their institutions every five years, to keep up with the pace of change.” ¹ Presidents and vice-chancellors must foster “disruptive innovation” if they are to ensure that their institutions survive and thrive.

But how to create an innovative university? How realistic is it for any college or university to “reinvent themselves” once, let alone every five years? Institutional change of any kind proves to be a complex process with limited success stories. Think of how some institutions transformed into research universities at the turn of the last century. Consider the case of the University of Central Florida, a commuter campus that took nearly 25 years to reinvent itself into a research university. ² Institutional change in higher education can be painfully slow. And the UCF case is an example of transforming into a preexisting form of the university; imagine the challenges of reinventing an institution into a wholly new, innovative kind of organization? And yet, the competitive environment for higher education is set to become even more challenging in the next decade. What approaches might universities undertake in order to reinvent themselves?

The strategist Steve Tighe observes that most businesses engage in “incrementalism” that is mistaken for innovation. “The fact is most companies struggle with strategic and innovation creativity. And the major factor behind this struggle is thinking that remains ‘anchored in the present. . .’without breaking free from today’s worldview, managers will always find it hard to innovate or to transform their business for the future in a timely manner.” Remaining anchored in the present often leads to what Tighe calls “faster horse strategies:” that is, “doing things better within the current paradigm (cost cutting, outsourcing, shared services, reduced package sizes) rather than doing things differently to meet or establish a new paradigm.” ³ The same might be said of institutions of higher education, many of which often succumb to such “faster horse” thinking, when what is demanded today is what I term “enterprise innovation,” reimagining the meaning and purpose of the university, creating new epistemological paradigms. As Michael Crow and William Debars have recently argued, universities today “must evaluate new alternatives with reference to the persistence of the status quo and the potential for novel forms of academic organization and even new institutional types.” ⁴ [emphasis mine]

One result of the faster horse approach to strategy is that many institutions of higher education begin to resemble each other, especially as they follow the same incrementalist strategies. Many colleges and universities “offer the same degrees in the same way, counting up the number of hours students are taught and adding them up to two- and four-year credentials. They hire people with the same pedigrees and organize them into the standard apparatus of academic departments. . .All of this adds up to long-term stagnation and a profound lack of imagination about the possibilities of change.” ⁵

Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory identifies a difference between share-taking strategies and market-making strategies. ⁶ Both types of institutional strategies pose risks. Share-taking (often the default approach) means competing for students against other institutions in an already crowded market. The risk of the share-taking strategy is that the pool of available students is projected to shrink over the coming decade, even before the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Incremental, faster horse strategies are frequently employed as an attempt to attract a greater share of an already highly competitive market.

A market-making strategy means developing a wholly new market, inciting new demand. Often called a “blue ocean strategy,” it means “the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.” ⁷ While businesses sometimes pursue riskier blue ocean strategies, colleges and universities rarely attempt it. “There are higher education commentators and pundits who would have institutions with enrollment shortfalls reach out almost exclusively to older learners and those who started but never completed a college degree,” Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman and Susan Campbell Baldrige observe. “It is a strategy, however, that assumes institutions at risk are more flexible and willing to innovate than they have proved to be in the past.” ⁸ One could even argue that seeking out such non-traditional students was once a blue ocean strategy, but is a market that is quickly being saturated as many institutions find themselves seeking the same market. But their point remains valid: that traditional universities are averse to such risky innovative strategies, often because this would involve the wholesale transformation of the core mission of the institution. This is the kind of innovation deemed necessary by Rogers, but that most institutions of higher education are loathe to pursue.

In my recent book, I imagined several new paradigms of the university. ⁹ For example, one called “Superager University” would be a university that admits only those 60 years of age and older. The superager group would not be seeking credentials or job training: instead, they would be seeking ways to keep their brains active and supple, and rigorous disciplinary study would do so better than daily crosswords or other so-called “brain training” activities. The point here is that such an innovative university would discover a new market for higher education by looking beyond the traditional eighteen to twenty-two year olds, or even the “adult education” market, by identifying a student population with different educational objectives and expectations. Market-making strategies would also involve creating novel forms of the university that create a demand that did not previously exist. Another example from my book was what I called Nomad University. This would be an epistemological organization without a central physical location, nor with traditional majors, disciplines and courses. Students would engage in a series of “Gap Year” experiences; that is, they would travel with a team of students and a faculty director to some part of the world to engage in a project. In performing the tasks associated with the project, the students develop aptitudes and skills. Self-reflection of their experience in a new place would be a feature of such projects. After a few months, the student would head off to another part of the globe with another faculty lead and another project. Satisfactorily completing eight of these projects would serve as the requirement for graduation. The student produced by such an educational institution would possess a wealth of tacit knowledge, will have developed a variety of skills and aptitudes and would be cosmopolitan travelers. That is, Nomad University would produce a new kind of graduate that the “market” did not realize it needed. (Of course, it would be incumbent upon Nomad University to promote its graduates, to engage in “business development” to market their talent to an audience that did not articulate the need, nor even realized they had the need.) Nomad University would not prepare students for an existing job, but indeed it would prepare the market to realize they need such graduates, thereby creating heretofore unimagined jobs. This is what I mean when I say that a market-making strategy induces demand. Many universities today seem to tailor—or to eliminate—their programs based strictly on what they perceive as the dictates of the market, in effect, being beholden to the market rather than having the market beholden to them. A university engaged in a market-making strategy would be the very definition of entrepreneurial: identifying or creating a market where none previously existed.

In the United States, the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 changed US patent policy, with dramatic effects on the mission of many US universities. Before 1980, any patents or intellectual property stemming from federally-funded university research would be the property of the US government. The Bayh-Dole Act allowed the universities funded by the government to retain, license and indeed commercialize any intellectual property arising out of such research. One result of this shift in policy was that many universities created technology and business incubators on the peripheries of their campuses. The idea for such incubators was to take knowledge produced by faculty and to convert this into patents, marketable intellectual property and, eventually, start-up businesses. As Simon Marginson has observed, “The counter-cultural experiments [experiments with the form of the university] of the 1960s to 1970s rejoined the mainstream in the 1980s to 1990s. Universities now ground their claim to be innovators through their research role and the creation of global linkages and site-based infrastructures, not in changes to the ‘idea of a university.’ [emphasis mine] New epistemological structures can be tried as long as they function by common rules [which hardly seems like a recipe for innovation]. Within the NPM [New Public Management] template some universities are remarkable creators of global relations. But in organizational culture itself, all have been NPM-ed. They opt for brand distinction rather than participatory decision systems, the abolitions of status, or unique missions.” ¹⁰ Universities incubate new ideas for products and businesses, but not new epistemological structures or organizations. NPM refers to the management of public sector organization as if they were like corporations or businesses, a lament of many academics. But the larger point here is that university incubation traditionally means new business enterprises, not new epistemological enterprises.

In order to bring about the kind of disruptive innovation that the current environment seemingly demands requires rethinking the idea of a university incubator. Universities might develop incubators not to generate new technology businesses or faster horse incrementalist ideas—new forms of delivery, new teaching methods, even new programs—but new forms of the very idea of the university itself.

The university as an “incubator of universities” is not a new idea. In 1925, President Glenn Frank invited Alexander Meiklejohn to the University of Wisconsin to design and build an Experimental College within the university. This was a Great Books college before great books colleges had yet to be developed. The Experimental College had its own building, its own faculty (called Advisers) and a student body of around one hundred.

[The Experimental College] abolished conventional subject divisions and organized the two years of study around “civilizations,” centering the first year on the Athens of Pericles and Plato, and the second year on the contemporary United States. They abolished lectures, examinations, and required class attendance, and substituted reading lists, papers, and weekly individual conferences with an adviser, rotating the students among the staff at six-week intervals during the academic year. . .Throughout, they built the program around reading and discussion, following Meiklejohn’s prescription that “in a very real sense, the course of study lays down the conditions of membership in the college community. A college is a group of people, all of whom are reading the same books. ¹¹

The Experimental College lasted from 1927 to 1932, and was disbanded, although the idea of a great books college was taken up by other institutions. But the point to be emphasized here is that an existing institution created a smaller unit housed within itself whose mission and raison d’etre differed from the rest of the organization.

One way of thinking about the Experimental College is that its “business model” was a radical departure from the larger business model of the University of Wisconsin. “Innovations that conform to an organization’s business model are adopted readily,” observe Michael B. Horn and Alana Dunagan. This is one way of explaining why incrementalist approaches are sometimes mistaken for innovation: they are small changes that leave the core of the organization relatively unchanged. “But innovations that do not conform either get rejected or, more often than not, are co-opted, as the organization’s business model modifies them to conform to the existing business model.” Horn and Dunagan argue that “Innovations aimed at redefining a college or university’s value proposition must be insulated from its existing business model or else it will conform to the inputs of the existing business model rather than create a new one.” One might look to how business has attempted to solve this problem. “One example is IBM, which was able to transition successfully into the personal computer market in the 1980s only by building an autonomous unit in Florida, far from its main headquarters in New York.” An autonomous unit, or strategic business unit, is often a unit with an existing company that operates as a de fact independent enterprise. “Creating an autonomous unit is critical for a college to launch as innovation aimed at dramatically transforming its value proposition.” ¹² And my argument here is that an innovative university, one that is positioned to frequently reinvent itself, needs to maintain a number of these autonomous units. Indeed, one might argue that the idea of the university, in this formulation, is a portfolio of autonomous units. Like the Experimental College, autonomous units within an existing university need not be physically distant, but they would need to be granted organizational distance and autonomy.

Horn and Dunagan describe the fate of four such autonomous units within existing universities. Bellevue University in Nebraska established a low-cost, competency-based program called Flexxive that looks somewhat like the model employed by Western Governors University. Tiffin University in Ohio—in partnership with the for-profit company Altius—established Ivy Bridge, an online university. Ivy Bridge was a forerunner to Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America, a similar on-line venture that was built as an autonomous unit from the larger university. ¹³ Each university had a different experience with their regional accreditor in permitting these innovative designs. The point here is to suggest that strategically innovative universities are those that design strategic business units within their organization, to allow for enterprise-and mission-level innovation to occur outside of the confines of the incumbent organization.

As a market-making strategy, universities today might redesign themselves into an incubator, in order to create many such experimental colleges and autonomous units. Such a university might begin by establishing a new position: vice provost for innovation. (It would be important that this initiative live under academic affairs and not the business side of the university.) The vice provost would lead a team of faculty, post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, those whose task would be to first imagine different possibilities for the university, new epistemological organizations. Foresight and futuring techniques would guide the deliberations of this team. They would identify long-term trends, and write a number of scenarios based on that trends assessment. Then they would imagine what a future university might look like in the world suggested by the scenario. The researchers would conduct interviews with stakeholders, to both get their reactions to the model and to help design some of its features. The team would then present their findings, after which the decision is made as to which models would be given initial funding to be constituted as a working experimental college.

Each experimental college would then be implemented by creating a “minimal viable product,” a small-scale version of each experimental college. Each would start small and modest, on the order of one hundred students and ten faculty. This would not involve a multi-million dollar initial investment or a large number of faculty hires (indeed, faculty could be drawn from among the ranks of the university). ¹⁴ Each experimental college would be led by a faculty principal (think of the principals of the residential colleges at the University of Virginia), who oversees a group of about a dozen faculty, and a small staff. The university-as-incubator maintains a portfolio of five or six experimental colleges at any given time. These would include the new, innovative epistemological organizations as well as the “legacy” units of the university. This vision of the university looks similar to the constituent college model found at University College London or the City University of New York. Both of these institutions are made up of a collection of separate unique colleges. The University-as-incubator manages not only pre-existing legacy organizational forms but also produces “organizational novelty.”

In this model, the idea of the university is that entity that engages in the creation and nurturing of organizational novelty, novelty here referring to new forms of epistemological organization. ¹⁵ The university exists to generate novelty; Padgett and Powell “find that novelty in new organizational form often emerges through spillover across multiple, intertwined social networks. Hence not autocatalysis within one network but interaction among autocatalytic networks is the key to generating novelty.” ¹⁶ It would befall to the vice-provost or to the group in charge of innovation to uncover and encourage these interactions between pre-existing networks. The design and implementation of new organizational forms becomes the raison d'etre of the university.

If any of the experimental colleges were to fail in the marketplace, then after a time they would be shuttered. Closing or ending initiatives—except in exceptional cases such as financial exigency moments—proves difficult to accomplish in higher education, a culture with a very low tolerance for design failure, Built into university-as-incubator is the capacity, the tolerance for organizational design failure. Those experimental colleges that prove popular would be allowed to grow: 200, then 500, then 1000, then 5000 students, with a concomitant increase in faculty hires, staff and administration. For any college that proves successful, one of two options would then follow: (1) The college continues to grow as an independent entity within the institutional structure of the university; (2) The college is “spun-off” into its own enterprise. The risks to the core mission of the institution of such an enterprise innovation model are thus minimized; that is, a university need not risk an “all-in” model of institutional reinvention.

The university is thereby reorganized as a “portfolio of colleges.” These are not a collection of disciplines—a college of engineering, a college of arts and humanities–but a collection of alternative epistemological organizations. Like a diversified financial portfolio that spreads risk across a number of assets, the university-as-incubator engages in diversified strategic innovation by spreading the risk across a number of small start-ups outside of the core mission of the existing institution, shielding the institution from the risks of change. One college could be the liberal arts college, another a research institute, another based on a new innovative epistemological form. Imagine if the microcollege Flagstaff College ¹⁷ were developed, capitalized and nurtured by an incumbent university pursuing a strategy of incubating innovative epistemological organizations.

State governments, accreditors, boards of trustees, the general public and others who hold universities accountable will no doubt resist the idea of designing new epistemological forms of the university. Regional accreditors often act to stifle innovation; faculty are often resistant to change, especially any change that implies something that may be lost; Boards of Trustees are generally speaking risk-averse. But if universities are indeed to pursue a strategy of re-invention, the university-as-incubator would render that task more nimble, feasible, and achievable.