Can Higher Ed Teach Itself to Change?
Imagining what it takes to grow the next generation of innovators
Why it matters:
This week, a few institutions asked how to build human-centered design skills inside their teams.
Their teams, members, and leaders are trying to navigate how they adapt in the complex, challenging moment we find ourselves in. I’m thankful to see that we’re part of a trend towards student- and stakeholder-centered listening, problem solving, and change, but I see the bigger challenge at hand. It carries the same tension I keep hearing across higher ed: We want more “innovation,” (solving complex problems based on stakeholder needs) but we haven’t built a way to prepare the people who will lead it.
We have advanced degrees in law, medicine, business, and education, but nothing designed to grow the mindsets and skills required to reimagine higher ed itself.
Instead, the work of transformation is mostly left to chance: earned on the fly, squeezed into side projects, or stumbled into after stepping into leadership and joining informal networks of peers doing similar work.
So the question isn’t just who will lead the future of higher education: it’s how we will prepare them to do it.
It reminded me of a post on Linkedin where I explored this question, and the conversation that followed reshaped how I think about what preparing innovators might require.
Go deeper:
From a Provocation to a Mirror
At first, I imagined the practical details: Would preparation for higher ed innovators come through an advanced degree? What level of credential would it be? What core skills would it develop? Who would teach it, and from what sectors?
But the responses to that question became less about the mechanics—and more about whether higher education could credibly be the place to develop these capacities at all.
What started as a innocent (enough) prompt quickly turned into a mirror:
If the best solution we can imagine to transform higher education is not to build a new credential within it… what does that reveal about how we feel we’re preparing students for the changing workforce?
The Crossroads: Program or Practice?
But as the conversation unfolded, a striking pattern emerged: almost no one believed this should become an academic program.
That wasn’t because the theory, skills, or discipline doesn’t matter (of course they do). It’s because formalizing them inside a traditional credential risks reshaping innovation into something it’s not.
It could become standardized, siloed, and assessed in ways that reward compliance over creativity. It could become something to “complete” rather than something to continually practice.
This felt less like a debate about where innovation lives and more about how it grows.
Degrees are designed to codify knowledge; innovation depends on context, curiosity, and courage. It flourishes in messy, emergent spaces: through relationships, experimentation, iteration, and reflection, not inside fixed curricula or course schedules.
Trying to fit it into an academic frame could unintentionally gatekeep it, slow it down, and strip it of the very energy we need more of.
And yet, there’s a real tension underneath this resistance: if not a credential, then what? Without structure, resources, and recognition, the work of becoming a changemaker often gets relegated to the margins: done in stolen hours, driven by personal willpower, invisible to the systems that most need it.
Or it’s held tightly within communities of practice that can be exclusive or driven by membership over threads and practices designed to establish new norms and cultures within the field.
That tension feels essential: not inside vs. outside the academy, but program vs. practice, and how we design learning experiences that carry the credibility of a program while protecting the fluidity of a practice accessible to a wide audience.
What We Might Be Building Instead
Rather than a singular new credential, what surfaced in the discussion was a vision of something more fluid and networked:
🔹 A web of applied learning experiences: where people practice innovation through real projects, coaching, and feedback, not just theory.
🔹 Cross-sector communities of practice: reflecting the complexity of the real world and help leaders think beyond the walls of their own institutions
🔹 Learning through cohorts, communities and mentorship: building connection and support to share wins, reflections, and make-meaning of navigating change
🔹 Embedded threads of innovation: woven into leadership programs, student affairs training, and career readiness curricula, not isolated as a standalone degree.
🔹 Cultures of courage and experimentation: spaces that reward risk-taking, reflection, and iteration instead of punishing it.
The Real Barrier Isn’t Content, It’s Context
What struck me most is that higher ed doesn’t necessarily lack the content to teach innovation.
We can list the skills: design thinking, systems change, experimentation, equity-centered leadership, cross-sector collaboration.
What’s missing is the context that makes learning those skills possible:
Psychological safety to try and fail
Structural permission to break from norms
Incentives that reward addressing problems, not replicating practices elsewhere
Time and recognition for collaborative work across boundaries
Inside most institutions, those conditions are scarce.
Which means preparing the next generation of innovators may require building learning environments that sit outside the traditional structures, at least at first, so they can develop the courage and creative capacity to re-enter and transform them.
A Glimpse Through the Edu x Design Fellowship
This question (how we actually prepare people to lead change) is part of what sparked my early experimentation with the Edu x Design Fellowship: an eight-week experience where higher ed professionals practice applying human-centered design to real challenges alongside peers from across the ecosystem.
What’s been striking is why people apply. They came from advising, teaching, career services, student affairs, digital learning, institutional research, and senior leadership. And while their contexts differ, their motivations across the 20+ applications reveal something shared and deeply aligned with this topic:
They’re navigating growing complexity without a map.
Many are being asked to respond to disruption: AI, shifting workforce demands, new learner expectations; but feel unprepared to design new responses, not just implement old ones.They want tools to move from ideas to action.
Several described having responsibility for “innovation” without structured ways to build that capability: seeking space to practice, test, and reflect rather than just absorb content.They crave community beyond their silos.
They’re hungry to learn alongside peers who see different parts of the system, to challenge their own assumptions, and to feel less alone in the work of change.They’re driven by equity and inclusion.
Many spoke about reimagining systems for nontraditional and marginalized learners and wanting approaches that center care, belonging, and student voice.They’re seeking permission to experiment.
Some simply want a space to try things, to step out of the pressure to get it “right” and into a mindset of iteration, play, and learning.
Their applications point to a bigger signal: There’s no intentional, scalable way to develop these capacities inside higher ed today.
The Fellowship isn’t a solution to that gap—but it reveals just how many people feel it, and how ready they are to grow.
To build what I envision, this Fellowship needs more support (and funding) to grow, but the early signal suggests the format and structure are headed in the right direction.
So… Can Higher Ed Teach Itself to Change?
Maybe. But if we keep trying to build the future from within the same systems that are struggling to evolve, we risk recreating the very friction we’re trying to overcome.
The alternative is harder but truer:
To prepare the next generation of higher ed innovators, we may need to build the scaffolding for them outside of higher ed invite them back in to transform it.
That’s not a degree. It’s a movement.
💭 Join the Conversation
This is only a starting point, and I’d love to keep the conversation going.
If this provokes something: hope, skepticism, questions, tension…I want to hear it.
🗨️ Join the conversation on LinkedIn →
📬 Or reply to share how you think we should prepare the next generation of innovators (or if you want to work on developing it together)
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