Are you a higher education leader who is in charge of planning campus innovation? Do you need a little help getting started? Well, look no further, as we have created an article that lists the three steps for strategically planning campus innovation.

• The first step in planning campus innovation is to clarify the goals and gaps. Clarifying the university’s goal is essential because, in general, higher education institutions have complex missions associated with most goals. Intentionality is essential as an institution’s goals are multifaceted. They include measures around enrollment, revenue, costs or productivity, learners’ success, learner composition, culture, faculty growth or diversity, community engagement, and curriculum. Once goals are clarified, the university can see its gaps and evaluate how far the institution can go to achieve its aims.
• The second step is to build a strategy to help the institution address its gaps and achieve its targets. At the same time, it is essential for the institution to ascertain and clarify what it does not want to do.
• The third and equally essential step is to implement a portfolio approach. This step is essential because not only does the university need to identify its goals and gaps, but the institution also needs a clear roadmap of where to start its investment in innovations. But how would the university ascertain which innovation it should invest in so that all its strategies are met? The best way is to try out investments in different types of innovations, ranging from the routine improvement of a class to the transformational launch of new online, competency-based, low-cost schools.

College administrators must understand the different types of projects they should consider because this helps them decide where they need to invest to realize their goals as well as the organizational capacity to take on projects in the future. Institutions also need to create a rhythm to encourage innovative ideas from faculty, learners, alumni, and others, which can be regularly compared with other similar types of ideas.

Creating campus innovation is easier said than done. But campus innovation is necessary to keep up-to-date with shifts in learners’ expectations, changes in institutional funding streams, and the need to embrace today’s “learning by creating” paradigm. The modern makers approach has helped learners as they can leverage the conventional spirit of an education community and simultaneously grow their entrepreneurial focus.

Concluding thoughts

So, plan innovation using the steps mentioned above and monitor the feedback because innovation is a complicated process. But you can be certain that well planned innovation will have a significant impact on your institution, and it will allow any institution to grow.