Innovation – Everyone Says It’s the Answer, but Is It What Colleges Need?
You can always chide higher education by referring to innovation in the sector. Or, rather, the supposed lack of it. The criticism should be familiar: Paradoxically, in an industry full of thoughtful people, the imaginative ideas are strangled by dull leadership and organizational bureaucracy. That swipe is at the top of an article on higher education’s "16 most innovative people" in the current issue of Washington Monthly. And it was embedded in some of the opening remarks in a panel at New America on Thursday, based on the Washington Monthly article and featuring three of the innovators it described. They each got a chance to talk about what innovation is for, where it comes from within an organization, how you can measure its success — and, hey, what’s higher ed’s problem, anyway?