You’re in a committee meeting. (You’ve never been in one of those? Lucky you.) Someone has done great work. Maybe they’ve mapped a better enrollment communications flow or built a smarter website governance model.
Then someone says: “We tried something like that before.”
Or: “That would never work here.”
Or: “We just don’t have the capacity.”
And just like that, the idea is no longer being judged on whether it’s smart, timely, or necessary. It’s being judged on whether it feels familiar or safe. Whether the institution is ready to deal with the friction real change creates.
So the idea stalls. (Again.)
The pitch was fine. The room simply had no shared way to evaluate it. No common language for what kind of innovation it was. No structure for separating a one-off tactic from a real strategic shift.
I’ve heard versions of this story for 20 years. Every time, the problem sat with the room, but the room was built to compare the idea to the last time something similar was attempted.
Start with the Word Itself
Before an institution fixes the room, it has to agree on the word. Larry Keeley, who spent three decades studying this at the global innovation and design strategy firm Doblin, defines innovation as the creation of a viable new offering. Two words in there carry the weight.
- Viable means the thing sustains itself — financially, operationally, politically — past the pilot phase.
- New means new to your market and your students. Borrowed ideas count.
Hold your campus against Keeley’s definition and the gap shows fast. Before my keynote at CUPRAP on this topic last spring, I polled my network of higher ed marketers: when your institution invests in innovation, where does the money go? Nearly half said technology. A tool. Procurement standing in for strategy.
A shared definition gives the committee meeting a floor to stand on. When everyone in the room means the same thing by the word, an idea gets measured against a standard instead of a memory.
Three Ways Campuses Get Innovation Wrong
The first is treating innovation as temporary. Like a rebrand or a task force that meets twice. These projects have end dates, so whatever they produce stops compounding the moment the project closes. Real innovation keeps compounding.
The second is treating it as performance. The innovation lab with a glass wall and no budget authority. These structures exist to signal movement. Signaling is what they do. It’s also all they do.
The third is the hardest to see: innovation staying invisible. Work of genuine newness — a redesigned advising model, a partnership reshaping how transfer students arrive — goes unnamed as innovation, so it goes unfunded as innovation. Your campus is almost certainly doing more innovating than it gives itself credit for. The language to see it is missing.
The Ten Types of Innovation
A definition sets the floor. A framework builds the room.
In 2013, Keeley and his team at Doblin published research on more than 2,000 successful innovations across industries. Their finding: innovation shows up in ten distinct types, and the strongest organizations combine several at once.
The ten types fall into three domains.
Configuration covers how you organize:
- Revenue model
- Partnerships
- Structure
- Processes
Offering covers what you deliver:
- Core product
- Systems around it
Experience covers how people encounter you:
- Service
- Channels
- Brand
- How you engage your audiences
Read those against your own campus and one thing jumps out. Almost everything higher ed celebrates as innovation lives in a single type: Offering. The new major. The new online program. Improvements to the core offering.
Those investments are real. They’re also the most expensive and most copyable moves on the board. When your differentiation strategy is a program your competitor launches in eighteen months, you have a head start, and head starts expire.
Even the Most Resourced Institution Defaults to the Familiar
In April, Yale released its Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education — a year of faculty research into why public confidence in higher ed has collapsed, ending in 20 recommendations for rebuilding it. It’s a serious document, and parts of it are genuinely bold.
Look at where the recommendations concentrate: affordability, admissions, grading, resource allocation. The visible levers. The announceable levers.
Institutions default to the moves they already know how to evaluate. A board has a rubric for a building: cost, capacity, donor naming rights. A board has no rubric for a channel strategy or an engagement system. So the building wins, every budget cycle, at every institution — including the most resourced one in America, in the middle of a trust crisis.
A shared definition tells the room what innovation is. A framework tells the room how to judge it: what kind of innovation an idea represents, what it costs relative to the alternatives, what it compounds into over time, and how to weigh a familiar move against an unfamiliar one. Higher ed is missing the framework, and the missing framework is the structural problem.
Build a Better Room
Go back to the committee meeting. Same idea. Same objections.
Now give the room a framework. The enrollment communications flow gets named as Channel and Service innovation. It gets weighed against what those types cost, what they return, and what happens when competitors move first. “We tried something like that before” loses its veto power, because the room finally has something better than memory to compare against.
That framework exists. In the next post, I’ll walk through all 10 innovation types and show you what the institutions winning right now have in common. A better product is the smallest part of the answer.
This article is the first in a three-part series about innovation in higher education. Part Two discusses the 10 types of innovation that universities should be using. Part Three shows how marketers can bring smarter innovation to campus and earn the public’s trust.
