Business Model Innovation for Education

This month, I'll deviate a bit from my recent posts and focus on a specific application in a specific industry. The upcoming blog posts and resulting article will apply innovation techniques regarding business models to the higher education industry. You can track the posts on the Innovations in Strategy Crafting blog.

In the view of many educational and political leaders, the current financial model for higher education is broken. Higher education institutions need to innovate their strategies, program offerings, and business models if they are to meet emerging value expectations and achieve financial sustainability. Yet institutions are timid at best in their approaches to business model innovation. Most do not have their existing business models well articulated nor can they describe them in simple ways to constituents. They lack effective tools and experience in making significant leaps in business model design and delivery.

New tools provide for description, diagnosis and optimization of both current business models and new ideas under consideration. By deploying these tools in describing innovative approaches current in practice at a few institutions, we will stretch the thinking about the potentials of business model innovation, the tools and techniques to do so, and the ways that real innovators are successfully exploring the frontiers of innovation.

Innovation practices have worked their way through most industries. While innovator was a term for heretics from the 15th to the 18th centuries, the scientific and industrial revolutions reframed innovators as geniuses and more recently akin to rockstars. Innovation spread from science and technology, through business practices, and now has a foothold in many places. Innovation on the cultural and meta levels emerged the last 15 years. One great example is captured in the text Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur.

In the upcoming blog posts and resulting article, we explain the concept of business model innovation and adapt the language and application specifically to the education industry. Throughout, we explore examples of how educators can innovate their own business models to better explain the value propositions of education, create new models for learning, and find new sources of revenue generation. There are many useful parallels outside of higher education, so even if you work in a related or unrelated field, you should find the writing useful.

I have invited a guest blogger to explore this topic and methodology along with me. Dr. Don Norris, is a consulting partner and education industry thought-leader. He is President of Strategic Initiatives and we've written several articles for the education industry. Look for more content in the coming weeks...