You’re Innovating in One Type. Your Competitors Are Combining Five.

This article is Part Two in a three-part series about innovation in higher education. Part One introduces the innovation framework and explains how most schools get it wrong. Part Three shows how marketers can bring smarter innovation to campus and earn the public’s trust.

Arizona State has been ranked the most innovative university in America for 11 straight years. Ask people why and you’ll hear the same answers. “They built a great online program.” “They partnered with some employers.” “They have a strong brand.”

All true. All missing the point.

ASU built a system. 

• Online delivery became the primary model, at global scale = Channel innovation. 
• Starbucks, Uber, and edX fund enrollment = Network. 
• “New American University” operates as a charter, not a tagline = Brand. 
• Multiple revenue engines across tuition, cohorts, and research = Profit Model. 
• Access redefined merit at the institutional level = Structure.

Five types, working together. Your campus could copy the online program this year. The system is a different story.

The Ten Types Framework

The Ten Types of Innovation framework comes from Larry Keeley and Doblin, built on analysis of thousands of successful innovations across industries. It organizes innovation into three domains.

1. Configuration is the machinery nobody sees.
   1. Profit Model: how you make money and who pays. 
   2. Network: who you partner with and why. 
   3. Structure: how you organize talent and assets. 
   4. Process: how the work gets done.
2. Offering is what most people mean when they say innovation.
   1. Product Performance: the quality and capability of what you deliver. 
   2. Product System: how your offerings connect and stack.
3. Experience is where trust gets built.
   1. Service: how you support people beyond the core offering. 
   2. Channel: how your offering reaches them. 
   3. Brand: what you stand for and whether anyone believes it. 
   4. Customer Engagement: the interactions creating loyalty.

Keeley’s research found the most successful innovations combine five or more types. Higher ed, as an industry, concentrates almost everything in one.

The types carry wildly different price tags. A new building costs nine figures. A direct admissions partnership or a brand promise with proof behind it costs discipline, not capital.

The Product Performance Trap

Walk any campus and count the innovation investments: a new stadium, academic program, or a gleaming rec center. All Product Performance, improvements to the core offering.

Why does higher ed keep choosing this lever? It photographs well. It comes with a ribbon-cutting. Product Performance is the innovation type you announce.

It’s also the type competitors see and copy. Launch a cybersecurity program and every institution in your market launches one within two years. Build a better dorm and the campus across town breaks ground on a nicer one. Product Performance is a feature war, and feature wars end in commoditization. Everyone improves. Differentiation disappears.

What Combination Looks Like

Georgia State tells the same story from a different angle. Their student success transformation was a system, built piece by piece. 

• Predictive analytics flag struggling students = Process. 
• Proactive advising and micro-grants intervene at the moment of need = Service. 
• Texting and chatbots keep students responsive = Customer Engagement. 
• Measurable equity outcomes became the institutional story = Brand.

Each piece reinforces the others. The analytics create the reason to intervene, and the advising capacity makes intervention possible. The micro-grant removes the $300 barrier standing between a student and a degree. Remove any one piece and the system weakens. That interdependence is exactly what makes it impossible to copy with a single budget line.

Single-type innovation is visible, which is why it gets funded. Combined innovation is durable, which is why it wins.

Run This Audit Tomorrow

Take your institution’s last five innovation announcements. Map each one against the ten types. 

Most campuses discover two things. First, nearly everything lands in Product Performance. Second, work already happening in the other nine types has never been named or resourced as innovation.

The second discovery is the opportunity. The work exists. Your job is naming it, then pulling those levers deliberately and in combination.

Which raises the question the final post in this series answers: who on your campus owns those levers? Look closely at Service, Channel, Brand, Customer Engagement, and Network, and you’ll notice something. Five of the ten types run through one office. The innovation budget lives somewhere else.