Co-creation Labs: Building, Coaching, and Implementing Innovation Practices
University with Global Campuses
It all began with two provocative questions from a Senior Vice Chancellor: how can we innovate within a bureaucracy? And, how will we do it in service to our students, our faculty, and our industry partners?
This university which serves over 40,000 students is rethinking the future of higher education, adopting the latest research in learning science and pioneering the path to tomorrow’s professional workforce. Along the way, university leaders are striving to improve the organization’s effectiveness, innovation toolkit, and sense of belonging for all learners.
Innovating is always hard, especially within established higher education institutions, which typically view innovation within the constraints of existing political, bureaucratic, and operational structures. As an active partner from outside that space, Frontier leverages deep listening and a nuanced understanding of university dynamics to enable our partners to recognize innovative possibilities beyond the existing horizon.
In a space where radical innovation is often met with, “but we don’t typically…” or, “I don’t see how we could…”, Frontier challenges the status quo and enables university partners to instead ask the question, “What if we did?” Together with our clients, we designed and implemented an innovation studio to create novel offerings across their university campuses. Frontier also provides executive coaching, organizational development, impact measurement, strategic communications, and culture-building support to effectively navigate the dynamics of change associated with innovation.
Through our partnership, this university department has transitioned from implementing siloed, legacy programs into an organization driving the innovation and change necessary to evolve the future of higher education. Legacy programs now have goals focused on innovation and leaders have the tools necessary to lead change. Processes and organizational capacities that cultivate innovation are in place, including an innovation lab charged with co-creating new products and services. To best analyze and implement these ambitious changes, we built tools for prioritization, risk assessment, market research, user research,and financial modeling to evaluate and action the most promising ideas.
We’ve helped develop resilient leaders who view change as a necessity for 21st-century success, rather than seeking to protect the status quo. These leaders are creating the conditions for a resilient, distributed workforce built around continuous change and lifelong learning that will define the future of higher education.