Note: This interview in the Innovation Spotlight Series originally aired on March 13, 2023 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Ian Wilhelm:
The biggest killer of innovation is designating some people as innovators.
Peter Temes:
I think there's a lot of truth to that, and we've worked with a lot of organizations. Bridget, you mentioned Arizona State. I think there are others who reached a level of maturity where folks will sometimes from the outside say, "Well, I guess that celebrated innovation work didn't really work, huh? Because where's the group anymore? It's gone. There is no innovation group anymore." Sometimes it's because the whole organization has become the innovation group. We really see this, and it's very much a function of Internet technologies maturing, and we all know how pervasive the use of these technologies are, even when you have a cranky old professor like me in front of a group of younger students, and the professor says, "There's no online module for this course. It's just us." It's not so different from Plato sitting at one end of a log and you all sitting at the other end. That's how I like to teach.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns.
Hi. Welcome to an episode of Innovation Spotlight. I'm your host, Bridget Burns with the University Innovation Alliance.
Ian Wilhelm:
And I'm your co-host Ian Wilhelm, with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Bridget Burns:
Each week, Ian and I are going to team up to bring you conversations with thought leaders and innovators and those who are kind of changing the game, so that you can be able to learn insights and perspectives that help you in your work as you try and advance innovation on your campus, and try and improve outcomes for student success. Innovation Spotlight is a show designed to elevate the cutting edge ideas, interventions, and innovators that we think are helping shape the future of higher ed, and our hope is that this is just a little nugget of inspiration for you, as you go throughout the week, that gives you new ideas that help you think differently about your work.
Ian Wilhelm:
Later, we're going to hear from Peter Temes, the president of the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations, which is a natural community of practice that the UIA is part of. Peter is going to share insights observed from outside of higher education that'll help you think differently about how you work on your campus. But first I'm going to take my prerogative here as a journalist. I find it helpful to hear insights being gleaned in real time from the field, Bridget, from you specifically. You work with institutions and speak to universities and colleges across the country, various [inaudible 00:02:30] scope as part of your work at the University Innovation Alliance, so I just have a couple questions for you. What is something you can share from innovation in real time right now? Particularly what is going getting in the way of innovation on campuses at this exact moment that you like to elevate for our audience, make sure that they're thinking about when they comes to their work on a day-to-day basis?
Bridget Burns:
The thing that's really getting in the way for higher ed at this exact moment, you have transition and turnover, is it feels like it's an all-time high. It's not just that we're seeing a lot of presidents and provost transition. We know how difficult these jobs are in leadership, especially with heightened challenges around boards, the increasing challenges around politicization of higher ed. You're seeing turnover in presidency, which really kind of reshuffles the deck, and it kind of sets people back. But then within organizations, you're frequently seeing people transition at such a rate that whatever intervention or project or initiative is underway, it's on pause.
The solution that I recommend for addressing that is really that institutions should prioritize always having co-captains. Whatever intervention, whatever solution, whatever topic you're advancing, you need to have more than one person who is seen as the team lead. Too often, we revert in higher ed to having one voice as the leader, and it just sets you up for failure when this is consistently happening.
Then, of course, having cross-functional teams and all the other stuff that you know helps, but I would just say our best effort is to make sure that there's a co-captain for everything, and even things you wouldn't think of. Plan for the inevitable, and be surprised and delighted if it doesn't happen, but I would say that's the biggest threat that I'm seeing, and then the other issue that is pretty persistent, is that you have people trying to implement solutions who don't have the authority over the necessary domains in order to advance. I see a lot of people wasting a lot of time trying to convince peers at the exact same level on the org chart about their vision, and this is where we should go. If you look at the institutions that are able to advance significant change at a high velocity, typically they have a person who has enough authority over the people who need to do the work.
The example I've shared with my presidents is when I'm looking from the outside institutions, and they have these folks who are kind of mid-level administrators, and they're being tasked with improving outcomes or implementing this new complex intervention, rarely does that intervention entirely sit in their domain. Most of the time, it touches other departments, and it looks like a foosball table, and you have one of the players in the center trying to advance the ball down the foosball table. It's difficult. There's other people involved, and you can't control it, and so it's one of the reasons that we see the pace of change being so slow.
I would say deputizing someone with the level of authority necessary to implement is super helpful, and an example of that would be at Georgia State, Tim Rennick's position, Alison Calhoun Brown's position now as, I think, Senior Vice President for Student Success. They've also implemented that at University of Central Florida. That is a position that has enough authority that whatever topic around student success needs to be implemented, the things that pertain to that thing report to that person so they can direct it and they can advance. It's not perfect. None of these solutions around innovation are going to be a silver bullet, but I just want to offer these as an idea so that you can look at your org chart and ask yourself whether or not your people are truly set up to advance innovation, or if you are kind of hoping, and also if you're planning for transition or if you're consistently being surprised by it.
Ian Wilhelm:
Alright, so redundancy in those staffing positions, because we've got the staffing crisis, making sure people have the authority to make the changes that you're asking for, and then making sure you're aware of the foosball table, right? Making sure you've got enough hands on the foosball table to move the ball down the field. I think you might steal the analogy for an article or two. What is something you're seeing and noticing in the field that makes a difference for supporting innovation right now? What are folks getting right?
Bridget Burns:
I've seen institutions really prioritize how they are going to treat new ideas. That really matters to me. When I'm looking from the outside, I'm always trying to figure out what does this place think about innovation? What does it think about new ideas? Frequently there isn't a lot of thought. There's just kind of an assumption that, "Okay, we're doing a new thing, so we're just going to do that new thing." But there needs to be intentionality in terms of what is your protocol when we're about to do a new thing? Do we have a brainstorm session? Do we talk about it? Do we use "yes and"? Do we set up co-captains? Do we whiteboard it? New ideas are babies. They deserve to be treated with care until they become fully formed, and when interventions are coming in from the outside, you have to really set them up. So, making sure that you have all the people who are going to have to work on this thing in the room, instead of people being later informed and then you're surprised that they're not bought in. A process that is consistently what this institution believes, this is what we do when we do a new thing.
There are different examples that I can share, but I would just say briefly, one thing that's top of mind recently is just an extreme investment in project management and onboarding support at a campus. We've seen that at Arizona State. Lots and lots of project managers take that very seriously. As a result, you have practitioners who are the expert, but they can actually get a project manager to help them implement the new idea. They also had something called university initiatives, which was like an idea playground where they kind of prototype and pressure test new things before they go out into the institution. In general, whatever the strategies for your campus, you should just spend some time in reflection thinking about what do we think happens with new ideas at this place? What is possible? What are the impediments that have happened in the past? Where do we think new ideas come from, and how could we set ourselves up so that we had an easier time executing and implementing? Make sure those ideas, they should bubble up from your own people. But I would say it's an important conversation to have, and the campuses who get it right spend time and energy thinking about a protocol or process for how they're going to set new ideas up and interventions up for success. That's the thing I would say to get right right now.
Ian Wilhelm:
Treat those new ideas like newborns. I like that idea, and certainly we'll get to more of those examples, I'm sure, in future episodes of Innovation Spotlight. So thanks for those insights, Bridget. Appreciate those. Now, let's turn to our guest today, who's going to give us more insights. This is Peter Temes from the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations.
Peter Temes:
Hello hello.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome Peter, we're super excited to have you on.
Peter Temes:
Always a pleasure to talk with you.
Bridget Burns:
As Ian mentioned, UIA is a member of ILO, but hoping that you can share a little bit of context for the folks at home about what ILO is trying to do, because from our perspective, it's super helpful to learn from other spaces, and I feel like that's something that you do exceptionally well. As we go into this conversation, I think it's helpful for people to understand, "Why does he understand all these things?"
Peter Temes:
Well, thank you, and I appreciate the kind words. The Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations, also known as the ILO Institute, is really a community of about 50 members, we cap at 50, who kind of mirror the North American economy. We've got a couple of big hotel chains. We've got a couple of big technology companies, a couple of significant universities, health systems. We get together about 40 times a year in different cities, mixing up some of our current members with very smart, interesting people helping to lead innovation in large organizations and other organizations. We spend a day in which I present a little bit of our research. There are some answers to questions that we keep finding and some that haven't changed for a long time. But most importantly, we get people saying, "Here are the challenges we're dealing with, and here's what's working now. Here's what's not working, and here are some lessons we've learned."
You get that tremendous cross-fertilization, which does reflect one of the shifting best practices, one of the things that we weren't talking about ten years ago that we talk about today, which is innovation as a matching function, which is to say there are tremendously valuable emerging solutions to emerging challenges and problems. They're happening all over the place, and matching those, connecting those, is where you have a tremendous amount of value, often in the shortest amount of time.
Bridget Burns:
Today's episode is sponsored by the University Innovation Lab, which is a digital ecosystem designed to help higher ed professionals just like you and I accelerate innovation with a wide array of tools, trainings, resources, and community all in one location. If you also want to drive change and advance student success on your campus, but feel like there aren't enough hours in the day, and frankly you don't always know where to start, the University Innovation Lab can help. It was created with tools and templates and professional development uniquely generated by the UIA. The lab helps student success administrators and innovators advance student-centered change and improvement more effectively with more clarity, collaboration and impact. To join our wait list, go to theuia.org and click the resources page.
Bridget Burns:
Can you give us an example of what you mean by that so that people can kind of really grasp it?
Peter Temes:
Yeah, so absolutely. Some years ago, Eli Lilly, the large drug firm, was one of our members. NASA is a great organization we've had a relationship with almost from the beginning. Lilly, which is always solving these really tough kind of pure science problems, among other things, they said, "Look, we are building a platform to take some of our unsolved challenges from our lab that we couldn't solve with 3,000 PhD MD researchers, and putting this out there for the world. We think it's a platform that's valuable to everyone because it's about matching rather than going into the secret lab and just creating. We need to find other partners who can help validate this and not only around pure science stuff." And we were privileged to be able to be at the table, and help make introductions, and help kind of drive the collaboration with NASA becoming a very, very important early partner for them.
NASA began putting challenges up on that platform, saying, for example, "Here are the specs of the new space glove, and if we let Lockheed Martin do it, it'll cost $97 million. Who out there would like to give us a prototype? Then if we really like it, we'll invest in it, but we'll be able to procure without going through the regular procurement process. Not just save money, but open up the conversation and learn unexpected things even while we solve the known problem." The role that we got to play was both through the conversation, which is part of what higher education is all about, to say we're bringing together people who are learners and teachers, not necessarily these guys and these guys, but we're all learners, we're all teachers in this beautiful space where learning comes first. We try to do that in a very focused way, both to match emerging opportunities and emerging resources, but also to create more platforms and more engines for more of that matching.
To me, that's a nice example. You also have a lot of organizations we work with. Another good example, look at what happened during COVID. You had all kinds of large organizations saying, "Here's a vital challenge we have to adapt to right now if we're going to keep operating under these uncertain conditions. Who in our organization should be in charge of this? Who in our organization should be in charge of that?" You don't have time to do the research, write the job description and do a hiring process against what you think you know about the right kind of profile to do that leadership. Instead, what you saw a lot was we have ten different candidate mini organizations inside our firm. We're going to have to match those resources against these challenges. You have the kind of inefficiency that most organizations don't usually like, which was very productive. The inefficiency was instead of the right person doing the right job, we're going to have lots of people doing the same job at the same time, quickly on a fast cycle to discover where the match really is.
So figuring out ways to make those engines for matching resources and challenges without needing to go through a global crisis, without needing to spend a tremendous amount of money on it. That's one of the things that we talk about and that we advise our firms on today.
Bridget Burns:
I was just wondering if you could share the biggest challenge you're observing around innovation in large organizations that you think -- you heard a little bit about what I'm seeing in higher ed, but I'm just curious about what we can learn from the challenges happening in other sectors right now.
Peter Temes:
It's interesting. That point about matching, that's something that's relatively new. It's a function of being able to do that better because of new inexpensive communications technologies and lots of data. But the biggest lesson is still the fundamental that hasn't changed since we started doing this work 18 years ago, and that's this idea of systematically lowering the cost of failure. You were just talking about ASU, you could look at other universities that have a deserved reputation for being positive innovators. Certainly in the private sector, you see the same, perhaps even more so. The big organizations that are better over time at doing new things and making them work are almost never more likely to succeed in a single iteration, which is to say, I've got the light bulb. Maybe I'm a student, maybe I'm a cafeteria worker, maybe I'm a professor or a dean. Here's an idea. How do I test it?
If I test it slowly and I invest a lot in the testing, it turns out it tends not to be more likely to succeed anyway, but it's more expensive to succeed. It has a high cost of failure once I make the test long and slow and very, very deliberate. If I can say, "Okay, look, we have lots of tools for testing. Let's test fast and look for an early signal in a way that has low cost in terms of money, low cost in terms of time, low cost in terms of impact on current relationships and reputation, and low cost in terms of impact on the people inside the organization who might or might not want to volunteer to try to help." If you keep those costs low, you'll see lots of experimenting going on without harm being done when those experiments fail.
In fact, with positives, with lots of learning, and you'll see what looks like a much higher batting average because the world doesn't see most of those little mini experiments, and you probably need to be careful that the world doesn't see them. The world just sees the first things that come to market and say, "Boy, these guys seem to get it right most of the time." Nobody gets it right most of the time. Those who seem to usually are very intentional about lowering the cost of failure. So, figuring out how to do that is key.
Ian Wilhelm:
Peter, I was going to jump in there, because I want to pick up on that point about the idea of failure. We've heard about the importance of it from different sectors, and I think higher ed does struggle with that a lot. I just wonder from the folks who may be listening who may manage a small team, they may not have the ability to change the culture of the administration, but it starts with that small team, and I've heard you talk a little bit about this. What are the incentives, you think? How can they make sure some they can start to experiment just in that small area because then they potentially can bubble up?
Peter Temes:
Well, small teams can be really, really effective at this, partly because one of the most fun ways to learn from failure is to learn from other people's failures. When you have the constraints where you say, "Man, I wish I had 12 people I could have work on this for the next month, I don't, I can't," you start thinking a little bit like an economist and you say, "Well, where is there a natural experiment going on? Who is doing something similar? What's happening? How's it going inside my organization, outside my organization?" We like to say that if you believe in this idea of lowering the cost of failure, the lowest cost of failure happens where you've already paid for experiments that you're not paying attention to.
Man, universities are filled with that, partly because you actually -- university is very interesting, because you tend to have a fairly small number of job functions and job descriptions, and a lot of people doing the same job. That's great. That's a naturally occurring experiment. Someone is doing that job better. If you look at an organization with five or 50 or 500 professional academic counselors or student support people, they may be operating out of a handbook, but everyone's doing a somewhat different job every day, and many of them are discovering on the fly things that aren't in the handbook that become a really great practice. Are you capturing it? Those are experiments that you paid for. They probably have a very low cost of failure. Are you out there engaging those people in a very positive, reward-oriented way to socialize the best things they're doing every day and move them up to be the normal practice?
Ian Wilhelm:
Thanks, Peter.
Bridget Burns:
I wanted to see if you could share a little bit about the concept of efficiency versus discovery organizations. I was trying to figure out how I could share one of your slides. I just think it would be really powerful for folks at home to understand that this framework which you derive from working with large organizations in other sectors, how useful it is to think about the posture of different parts of the academy.
Peter Temes:
Absolutely. Fortunately, I have an interpretive dance version of that chart. It is two overlapping circles, it's a Venn diagram. It begins with this observation. Most organizations are oriented either toward efficiency or toward discovery, and most are oriented toward efficiency. Within organizations, most functions are oriented either toward efficiency or discovery, and most of those functions are oriented toward efficiency, and that's all good. It is not necessarily a bad thing, even in an innovative university or an innovative corporation or hospital, to say, "Man, most people are just focused on efficiency." Efficiency, for all kinds of reasons, we want really good efficiency, but we also want the right amount of discovery-oriented work, which means you're going to be doing things day to day with folks who work in that space that look terrible from the efficiency standards. They're not narrowly focused, they're not repeating success, they're doing all kinds of internal market making to see who's most interested in what and they're doing things -- they're asking questions that we don't know the answers to, and those are some of the most important questions we should be asking.
The biggest killer of innovation initiatives in real progress, we find, is when you charter a person or a group and say, "Look, you are my discovery group. You are the individual. You're the human on my team who's leading this bunch of folks who are going to help us learn how to operate on the frontier, and do things we don't really do well much better, and maybe do things we've never done before well." That discovery leader cannot be asked how you spent every nickel every week, cannot be asked to evaluate the folks on their team with the same checklist that the efficiency-oriented organization is always leaning on. That drives people out, and it's really counterproductive, and that is the norm.
The norm is we have the university president who says, "I need a head of new ventures, I need a head of discovery." We have a CEO or a business unit leader who says, "We're going to charter this innovation group. It's awesome," and then a week into the building of this new organization inside the bigger organization, either the CFO or the head of HR or someone else picks up the phone and just says, "Okay, here are the rules. Here's what you're responsible for. Here's how many units you have to move this week," and it just pulls apart the way that this kind of mini organization, discovery-oriented organization, needs to work.
Ian Wilhelm:
Oh, I find it fascinating. The biggest killer of innovation is designating some people as innovators.
Peter Temes:
I think there's a lot of truth to that, and we've worked with a lot of organizations. Bridget, you mentioned Arizona State. I think there are others who reached a level of maturity where folks will sometimes, from the outside, say, "Well, I guess that celebrated innovation where it didn't really work, huh? Because where's the group anymore? It's gone. There is no innovation group anymore." Sometimes it's because the whole organization has become the innovation group. We really see this, and it's very much a function of Internet technologies maturing, and we all know how pervasive the use of these technologies are. Even when you have a cranky old professor like me in front of a group of younger students, and the professor says, "There's no online module for this course, it's just us. It's not so different from Plato sitting at one end of a log and you all sitting at the other end. That's how I like to teach."
But you are in this communications-saturated world. Even you, Professor Cranky, you have so many flows of information, and if you are the kind of old-school professor who I think most of us remember with at least some fondness, you're someone who loves learning, and there's so much digital technology making so much learning available, you're swimming in it, and you are bringing it to folks even if you're just sitting on a log talking. The maturity of these technologies is what's really changed the game enormously, and how we deploy that is still up in the air, and it's fascinating. When I started college, gosh, at Brooklyn College in the '80s in New York, part of the City University, in every corner of the room was a large vacuum tube television hung by a big metal support arm, and someone got the contract not just to sell the TVs, but just to install them, that was probably millions of dollars. None of them worked, none of them were connected.
This was part of the new wave of technology that would revolutionize higher education video-based learning. What you can observe is that these were interim technologies. This was an investment in the hardware before we understood what the learning function was. This was an investment from the plan down to the folks, and the folks who were sitting in that room potentially watching had not been asked or observed or given the positive experimental status to say, "Well, here's how I would use this tool if I could flip around the TV." Even that, I'm just saying casually, if I could flip around the TV. Those TVs were not built to be flipped around. They were built to be one-way communications devices. Unfortunately, a lot of higher ed, by no means all of it, traditionally has been about that one-way communication, especially with undergraduates. Now we're in this multi-directional communications world, which is a beautiful thing. Nobody knows the right way to do this next week or next month. Virtually all of the kind of learning we do has to have those elements of discovery.
Let me specifically speak to this example that's emerging in real time right now. We've been reading a lot about how ChatGPT is changing the game of college instruction. Ian, in your very fine journal, I recently picked up the virtual version and the headline was "Universities Must Change Fundamentally Because of ChatGPT." Again, for me as a teacher, I'm like, "Well, thank God. Taken long enough." ChatGPT is not tearing down good things in higher ed. It's challenging the way that a professor can say, "I want seven pages on this topic that answers these three questions and my graduate teaching assistants will read them and grade them." How good an assessment of learning can that be? If you're telling me that because we now have this issue that ChatGPT might impersonate a B minus student brilliantly, what I'm going to have to do as a professor say, "Okay, Ian, okay, Bridget, we're going to talk for 15 minutes about The Iliad or about molecular transformation under certain conditions, and you're going to get an A if you can show me that you've really learned what this stuff is about." That is beautiful, and hopefully as we say, "Well, so much is automating, how many jobs will be lost?" Those people who are automated out of all those functional jobs, hopefully more of them will be in the room saying, "Young person, old person. Show me what you've learned and let's assess through that kind of genuine human communication."
Bridget Burns:
Yes, you couldn't have picked -- literally this week, Ian and I had a webinar where we learned just how much people want to talk about ChatGPT, so it is definitely in the forefront of people's minds. Well, thank you so much for coming today, Peter. The last question we want to ask in this new framing of our show, Innovation Spotlight, is who is an innovator or where is there an innovative organization that you think higher ed could learn the most from right now, and why?
Peter Temes:
That's a great question. I hate to point to some of the usual suspects, but I will say Microsoft has been such a fascinating transformation story under the leadership for about a decade now by Satya Nadella. Two or three things are important, and it's always a mistake to over personalize, but when you look at his personal story, it has a lot to do with his style of leadership. Satya was running a significant part of the business before he was elevated. He could as well have come from the outside, and he came in in a moment when Microsoft was certainly making a lot of money and had some monopoly strength in different areas, which is true of some universities in some circumstances. Even if it didn't do a lot of new things better, it would've had good year after good year leading toward a downslope.
The first thing he did, and he did it slowly, was he engaged a lot of his not just senior leadership but junior folks to help them speak to him. I say that very intentionally, to help them have the experience of telling the new boss how they saw the world and what their goals were beyond doing a good job this week or this month or this quarter. It took him several months to be able to say, "We need a new vision, and what I'm hearing and what I'm affirming is our future will be 100% mobile and 100% digital." That was very brave ten years ago. It turned out not to be 100% true. It was the kind of vision that was subject to change and to adjustment to the realities that were emerging to discovery. That clarity was enormously helpful. It then took him two years before he changed all the sales incentives to align with it, because he didn't want this to be the kind of sudden change in which people felt like the social contract of how they work had been changed without their engagement.
But then two years in things changed dramatically. Not all at once, but on a ramp. There were no surprises in that fundamental change. One of the reasons I think he was able to execute that well is, practically, he changed the sales incentives. People with a lot of talent and who cared about making more money started doing more of what he wanted them to do, and the whole firm aligned. It was also about trust. When a university or a corporation or a big not-for-profit says, "Here's our future and here's what we believe in," if you keep managing the same way, which everyone recognizes doesn't help get us there, you actually burn trust, and you create the habit of getting your folks saying, "Okay, that's what we're saying, but it's always a little different from what's really going on." Aligning those two is crucial.
He had a reputation of engaging people and really hearing difficult things. He and his wife have a son in their 20s, or sadly had a son. He passed away just this past month, and he was a very high-needs young man who had multiple disabilities. I think you can see that human experience in how he managed, and it softened him. It made him both a hard-charging, numbers-oriented leader and a very humane person who balanced that efficiency and that discovery in ways that reflected the kind of humility that makes leaders stronger. I think he's the first example I would point to.
Bridget Burns:
That's great. Well, I think it's a super helpful kind of tidbit for folks to consider in terms of not just analyzing the context of the scenario, the company, the organization, but also the leader and their personal approach and their backstory. It all affects how you lead. It also affects whether or not innovation is something that is just possible or something that's going to actually end up happening. Thank you so much, Peter. I wanted to share for folks at home, these are some of the organizations in ILO, so to give you a sense of the perspective that Peter was bringing to the table to help inform our conversation today. Thank you again, Peter. We appreciate the chance to hear from you and for sharing your insights about innovation today.
Peter Temes:
Fantastic. Thank you so much. What a privilege.
Ian Wilhelm:
Thank you, Peter, and thanks to everybody at home who's watching this. We do hope to share more insights like Peter's for future sessions, and we also want to hear from all of you -- even if you're a self-described Professor Cranky like Peter described, we want to hear from you as well, and to kind of hear what are the challenges in innovation on your campus so we can best find you some solutions, perhaps, to how you can move forward in this time.
Bridget Burns:
The audio version of this episode will be available on the Innovating Together podcast. Thanks for being an excellent co-host for our first time, Ian, and we'll look forward to seeing you all for our next episode of Innovation Spotlight.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Peter Temes, Founder & President, Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations
Peter Temes founded the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations (ILO) in 2005 as a membership organization providing research, community, and knowledge-sharing for upper-level executives leading innovation inside multi-billion-dollar corporations. Member organizations have included IBM, PepsiCo, Marriott, Save the Children, Microsoft, FedEx, NASA, Toyota, and the New York MTA, among about 150 others. Dr. Temes began his career as a full-time member of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and went on to found Enterprise Interactive, a consulting and research firm. He has led research initiatives for Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Disney, EY, Pfizer, GM’s autonomous vehicles group, and many other companies in the technology, finance, and consumer marketing sectors. He has also served as Dean and Campus Chief Executive for Northeastern University, President of the Antioch New England Graduate School, and President of the Great Books Foundation. Dr. Temes is the author and editor of several books, including Teaching Leadership: Essays in Theory and Practice, The Just War: An American Reflection on the Morality of War in Our Time, and Against School Reform (And in Praise of Great Teaching): Getting Beyond Endless Testing, Regimentation, and Reform in Our Schools. He holds a Ph.D. and three master’s degrees from Columbia University.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, CEO, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founder and CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). For the past decade, she has advised university presidents, system chancellors, and state and federal policy leaders on strategies to expand access to higher education, address costs, and promote completion for students of all backgrounds. The UIA was developed during Bridget’s tenure as an American Council on Education (A.C.E.) Fellowship at Arizona State University. She held multiple roles within the Oregon University System, including serving as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor, where she won the national award for innovation in higher education government relations. She was a National Associate for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and has served on several statewide governing boards including ones governing higher education institutions, financial aid policy, and policy areas impacting children and families.
Co-Host: Ian Wilhelm, Assistant Managing Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ian Wilhelm is a journalist with more than 20 years of experience, covering higher education, nonprofits, and philanthropy. He currently serves as Assistant Managing Editor for Chronicle Intelligence (CI), a division of The Chronicle of Higher Education. CI produces content to inform colleges and universities about national issues and develop ways to solve pressing problems on campuses. Previously at The Chronicle, he was a senior editor, helping manage a team of reporters focused on enterprise and feature stories for its weekly newspaper and daily website. He also served as the international editor and senior writer for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the newspaper for the nonprofit world. As a freelance writer, Ian's articles have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Religion News Service, USA Today, The Washington Post, Newsday, and other publications. He has worked abroad, living in Germany and reporting stories from Africa, China, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
About Innovation Spotlight
Innovation Spotlight is an event series that happens live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. We feature short interviews with experts on specific interventions and innovations that serve student success, with a particular emphasis on the critical skills necessary to help an institution eliminate disparity. By elevating these cutting-edge insights, ideas, and innovators in the field, who share what they're learning from the front lines, we aim to help viewers identify the first three steps to take, what they need to know to take action tomorrow, and what experts have learned from implementation that they wished they’d known beforehand. We hope that, by surfacing these perspectives and inspirations, along with some tips and tricks to make the complicated business of innovation a little easier, we can help you in your work.
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Learn why hundreds of people have rated this new podcast 5 stars! Please join others and rate and review this podcast. This helps us reach and inform more people -- like you -- to help increase the number and diversity of college graduates in the United States.
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