Weekly Wisdom | Diffusion of Innovation & the 2024 UIA Summit

Bridget Burns: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Innovating Together podcast. I’m your host, Bridget Burns with the University Innovation Alliance. And today, I’m really excited because something we’ve been working on for a very long time is finally ready to go public. And I hope that what I have to share with you gives you some insight about how we think about the diffusion of innovation. And also, I hope that you will, yes, and the conversation and share with us events that you think are needed in the sector to solve specific problems, as well as nominate ones that we should learn from.

Bridget Burns: So, the thing I wanted to share with you today is that the UIA Summit, which only happens once every five years, the registration link has gone live. It is now something that you can register for, and we know it will sell out because it sells out and it’s only once every five years. And we also believe it’s the best event in higher education. And so, that’s really exciting to unveil. But I wanted to take a moment to explain exactly what we’re trying to do here. And in the hopes that you will, one, receive it with that intention, but also that you can recognize the ways that we think and hopefully you can contribute some more ideas to evolve the idea. So, first, we think that there are a lot of great events out there, and some are great, and some aren’t. We think that events and convenings as the primary means for the diffusion of innovation is a very slow pace. And we think that there are some structural problems to conferences and events that our sector should really team up on because we’ve all been to too many conferences with the carb buffet that you leave exhausted with a bag of tchotchkes and you heard some stuff and you don’t know exactly what to move forward on. And you’re the only one from your institution who came and you need to just go home and introvert super hard to make up for it. It’s a design flaw. And it’s frankly that we are all trying to create experiences that give people kind of the buffet of information out there and let them choose. But the way that we design these events lacks pedagogy. We are not, we are often designing fighting biology, and we are creating events that do lead to that overwhelming experience because we want to create value for you. So, I, as someone who has created a lot of events, like I am not critiquing the sector as though everything I do is great. In fact, I’ve only learned by doing things that didn’t work out. And it’s a million baby experiments that have got us to this place. So, what we think is that you should never come to an event alone, that you should come as a team. And that, in fact, the thing that’s missing is a space where people are convened as institutions, as cross-functional teams, where they can actually hear the great ideas, they can engage in iterative brainstorming, collaboration, pitching and catching ideas, that they can meet like-minded peers, that they can get super inspired, but that we actually get to the nuts and bolts of things of exactly how do I implement this? How do I even know that I should care about this topic? And often there’s a product matching problem where people want to talk about the thing they did, they don’t want to start with the problem they started with. And the only way that people can know whether or not they care about what you’re talking about is if you own the problem you had. And we are a sector that polishes things up and we like to talk about our success when we really need to start with the generous, vulnerable bid of the bid for connection, the bid for you and I are actually on the same playing field, like we’re all human here. And that offer, which is, here’s the problem we had. Here’s how bad the problem we had was. I mean, you don’t have to share too much if you’re uncomfortable, but I can tell you that at our events, at the UIA convenings where we’ve done failure sharing sessions and things like that, we find that this is an incredibly freeing experience. And if you share in a context that is a safe context, right? I’m not asking you to go out and just like scream to the rooftops, but I do think that it is really profoundly helpful as a sector. The way that we innovate is that we create spaces for people to share about the challenges and the struggles they’ve had. And we enable them to not go to professional development experiences as individuals, because you don’t implement solutions as individuals. You implement them as a team if it’s going to be successful. And so you have to curate an experience that is designed around the team, leaving not just with a big bag of tchotchkes and like full brains and carbs. What you want is a team that feels like they got a sampling of the best ideas. They clearly narrowed in on the problem, people who have the same problems as them. They were able to engage in conversations that you just can’t have any other place around those challenges and around the solutions they’re interested in. That we actually talk nuts and bolts. Like, what are the first steps? What are the first three things you do? What do you wish you’d known before you started? All that. And also, that you got team time while you were there at the event to build a plan of attack, to actually strategize about how you were going to go back to campus and how you’re going to take action. The last piece that we also have seen is missing is: we are an organization that we want to see ideas move faster. We have to serve millions more students. If you really want to see the future of our country, the future of our economic competitiveness of our democracy, if you want to see America thrive, if you want to see the world thrive, we need ideas to move faster. We cannot allow for a glacial pace of change. And the old school model of sharing ideas is like, you know, people just go on a campus visit that’s very slow, or they go to a conference or they read a white paper. And we have to keep tweaking as a sector with this model for how we diffuse and share innovation and how we help make it move faster and smoother. And so we decided to create a prototype five years ago in 2018 at the UIA National Summit, is what we called it. It was our first public-facing event. And it was incredible because, in the same way I’m sharing with you today, our vision, we shared our vision, which was we thought that this was a place that we could experiment as a sector with a different model. And we wanted to, you know, seek out like-minded peers, people in the field who also believed that ideas could move faster, that you go so much faster when you go together. That we’re not interested in the polishing up conversation. We want to talk real, we want to have real deeper levels of engagement and conversation about the things that get in the way when it comes to innovation, to change management, to management, to cross-functional teams, to implementing X solution or strategy. And so we did the summit. It was incredible. And I’m happy to share the sizzle reel. Just know that the energy was so palpable and it naturally led to the formation of multiple networks. And that is the piece that everything we do in the alliance should be about evolving ideas further. And like, you know, you don’t just do the same thing over. So that’s the one that we really want to lean into: this idea that you can structure an experience that naturally helps attract like-minded peers to form, you know, alliances, networks, clusters to commit to big, ambitious goals together, to decide to do work together, so that when they go back home as a team, they’re actually going to do it because they have accountability buddies, right? Because they have peers that they have teamed up with, and that there might even be some seed funding to support that work. Last time, the ECMC Foundation was very generous and gave us resources to support the networks that formed. And what we did is we allowed we used those resources and gave it to them, but we also said you could come to our internal convenings for the year so that you could have a space where you could basically leverage our structure and have a place to get together regularly so you start moving things forward. And it was fantastic. And it’s part of what led to the alliance expansion because we figured out that, yeah, it’s actually really so nice to have people from other places come. And it’s so, it adds to so much more perspective and depth and richness to the conversation. So this year, we’re thinking about where is higher ed. We still believe that innovation needs to move faster. In fact, we feel like we have a much better understanding of the things that really matter for innovation and change and that it’s actually not nearly as complicated as people think. And, but we really do always know that you need time to do innovation work and you’re not going to do it in the middle of your busy calendar with your inbox as overwhelming as it is. And so we create team time, of course, but we are going to build a summit that is going to not just give you what we everything we’ve learned in 10 years, but we are looking for 100 institutions around the country who are interested in driving change around student success and innovation that will serve and improve student outcomes, who actually are looking for those allies and those buddies, those networks. Because if you think about where we are as a country, we need to do a lot better job serving students. We need to serve far more, millions more, low-income, first-generation students of color, student parents, transfer students, all students. We know that change is hard and it’s much harder when you do it alone. And we also know that right now the headspace of higher ed is still struggling with the aftereffects of COVID, which I’ve talked about, the need for community inspiration and purpose, which are going to be touchstone values of this event. But we also know that right now, given the uncertainty with the election year and just so much like division in our country, that what we need more than anything is resilience. We need to be able to kind of like, you know, get shoulder to shoulder with people and get our head in the game and come up with a plan for what we’re going to do no matter what happens in the chapter ahead to make sure that we’re actually advancing regardless of what goes on across higher education, whatever happens in the election, whatever happens in anything that’s coming up. We want to make sure that institutions have had a chance to huddle as a team, period. Two, that they actually have found peers and allies who are in similar places that want to work on similar things and actually can help each other stay focused no matter what and actually have that kind of community and that resilient mindset that we all need. We all need it because this change and innovation work can often feel quite lonely. That’s part of the reason why improvement networks are so valuable. Like, I can, you know, you can count on a couple hands the innovation and change stories that don’t involve multiple groups of people, right? In a single individual, that’s going to be harder. But we know that you go further, you go faster, and it’s better sustained if you go as a group. And so, what we are going to do is design an experience that is infused with giving you the resilience, focused mindset you need for the chapter ahead that is really formed around the design values of community, inspiration, and purpose, and is embedded with 10 years worth of what we’ve learned across the alliance because this is our, in my mind, this is our gift to the sector. We only exist because of the generosity of other people creating experiences that helped us form. Those experiences were the Forum for the Future of Higher Ed. Aspen has the Aspen Institute. And essentially, there was a meeting where a lot of presidents were invited. And the 11 UIA founding presidents and chancellors, they huddled off in the corner. They let them have a side meeting. And that side meeting is when they decide that they’re going to form something, that they’re going to try and aspire to produce more graduates, that they’re going to try and produce more graduates across the socioeconomic spectrum, innovate together, transparently share their data, all of that. It’s one meeting that only existed because someone else invited us to their other meeting. And so, number one, we want to pay that forward. We think that there are groups that have already, I know so many different institutions that are like, I want to find a campus that wants to work on transfer in this way. I’m looking for an institution. Who else do you know that is trying to do this, that wants to do adaptive learning, that’s trying to do much more like active learning at scale, that’s trying to fix, you know, at this stage, they’re at this stage of predictive analytics adoption. And I often try and give people those answers, but wouldn’t it be better if we could actually create an experience that made it so you could find each other? And the structure of the event is designed for you to actually go through the process that we know helps, which is, you know, you got to get, we want to inspire you. We want to help you get aligned and find the people who have shared challenges. And then we want to create space for you to pitch and catch ideas and brainstorm. We’re also envisioning a pitch competition to be able to get resources to launch networks. And because we now have the UIA lab, we have what was missing in 2018, which is a place, an online ecosystem in which other collaboratives could actually hub, connect with us, and be able to keep moving the work forward. So that is our experiment that we want to do. And I hope you will consider joining us. We believe that the future is brighter than the past. We believe that we can do so much more for students by working together, and we believe that there are new allies and friends out there who can help evolve our ideas further, and we also believe that whatever we’ve done before, we can do better. We can figure out a new way. And so I hope that you will help us evolve this concept, help suggest speakers. Especially, I’m looking for people who are going to be able to really speak, you know, the message. Now, keep in mind that we’re having this event. I realize now I haven’t told you actually when it is, so that was a really long lead up. And it’s October 23rd through the 25th in Tempe, Arizona. And it’s two weeks before the election. And that is on purpose because I remember what I, my headspace before, like, especially with campaigns being so just everywhere and how you feel at that moment. And what you need is a plan no matter what. You need to have a plan that you’re going to move forward and keep your eye on the ball no matter what happens and that you have the allies and you have the support and the resources and you have the right focus. And so, this is literally going to be a, like, it’s a, it’s the crowning achievement. It’s going to be the ultimate, it’s going to be our gift and our love letter to the sector that was so generous to help us form and find each other. And we hope that the people and the institutions and the systems and the networks that come, we hope that you, yes, and everything we’ve done, like you build on it, you make it, you do far more and you do better because this is all about building a movement. The alliance was never about our institutions, it was about building a movement to change the value system of higher ed so that this work was easier and it was more seamless and it actually happened more often. And that being able to evolve our institutions to be student-centered was something that was possible because, you know, it’s still the case that the neighborhood you grew up in and the family that you’re born into, we can look at those two things and we can pretty much determine your life’s outcomes. We can guess at them and be pretty accurate. And that is, that’s super messed up. And we’re better than that as a country. We’re better than that as a sector because we know that higher ed is the talent activator, that we are the ones who make it so that, you know, in my mind, I, yes, I want there to be a strategy for the talent and opportunity in our country in the future of work. And I know that that’s going to require probably state strategies and all of us as a sector pulling together. But what it really means is that higher ed steps into its full purpose, which is we are the talent activator that is here to really squeeze all the talent from society, like to pull it forth, because the future is going to require all of the incredible potential that people have that has yet to be realized. We need it all if we’re going to be able to address any of the challenges facing the future of our democracy, our country, our economic competitiveness, the world, anything. We need every person to achieve their full potential and bring their talent to the table. And we know that we have a critical role to play there as institutions. And we know that the structure of higher ed in the past, it could be better. And we know that we can build on it because we’ve learned that going it alone is not the wisest path. We’ve learned that there are actually solutions, and we no longer have to ask questions about, you know, maybe could a campus achieve X or close their equity gaps or they could, you know, double their graduation rates, or could they, could they, could they? We know they can. We know they can, despite any story or narrative out there about being, you know, the faculty might not want to do X or they’re too unionized or they have a budget cut or there’s a presidential turnover. We’ve seen it happen at every one of those places. We have proven that story to be, it’s just a story. So we know that what we need is an experience that is designed to give us the headspace, the reflection, the community, the purpose, the inspiration, and the ideas that we’re going to need for the chapter ahead. And so that is what the UIA Summit is. I’m so excited to tell you that registration is finally open. People have been clamoring because they know that it sold out last time, it’s going to sell out, and it’s uiasummit2024.eventbrite.com. And I just want you to know that everything that we do is, we’re trying to offer, we try and solve the problems we see in front of us. And this is one where we still don’t see this experience out there at scale where a group of institutions across the country or across, you know, last time we found people, there were people from other countries who came. They teamed up on various topics. We want to set the stage to make it easy and seamless, intuitive, and possible for you to be able to find the peers and allies that you’re looking for, the strategy that you want to deploy, and the resilient, focused mindset that our students deserve. So I hope that you will consider coming. Again, the UIA National Summit is going to be October 23rd through the 25th in Tempe, Arizona. I can tell you that there will be fun, there will be joy. The way that we think is it should be team-oriented. It should be high-energy. We don’t do carb buffets. You can have carbs, it’s fine, but we actually believe in not fighting biology and making sure that you actually leave feeling energized. You leave feeling like you actually got work done and that when you go back home, you’re excited about what’s about to unfold, that you have the process that you’re going to follow, that you have the contacts that you need, and that there’s already a built-in thing on the calendar that you’re looking forward to to follow up. We also believe in, you know, we don’t believe in hour-long keynotes, we don’t believe in any like seven-minute talks, a maximum of 20 minutes for a keynote, and it’s going to be amazing. Flipped panels, immersive experiences, getting trained in process mapping and design thinking, skill building, all of that wrapped in together with the most enthusiastic, joy-filled, just good people. That’s the thing that, like, if people are like, you know, I’ve been doing this work for 10 years now, like, what is it that makes that possible? It’s because of the incredible people I get to work with. The incredible, like, just generous, really committed for the right reasons, care about students, thoughtful, willing to be wrong, willing to throw in on ideas and help make them better, and not really worried about who gets the credit. Those are the kind of people that we bring together. And I hope that you will come because you will be delighted by the people that you meet. So, I just wanted to take a moment to give you a sense of: we think that we can innovate the diffusion of innovation. We think that we can transform the future of our sector with more accountable, you know, vibrant, high-impact networks like the UIA. And we know that we can give you the mindset that you need to move forward no matter what is ahead of us. And because this work matters too much, it’s too important and it matters too much for anybody to give up. And so, we want to try and make that something that is easy and accessible for you all. And so, I thank you for the chance to talk about this today. I look forward to seeing you next week. And thanks again for listening to the Innovation, the Innovating Together podcast.