The Innovative University: From isolated activity to institutional capability
Universities are doing more innovation activity than ever. Across higher education, institutions have built entrepreneurship centres, incubators, research translation programmes, challenge-based learning initiatives, civic partnerships, digital transformation programmes, innovation districts and strategic collaborations with industry and government. Yet the presence of all this activity doesn’t actually make a university innovative.
Many universities have an impressive portfolio of programmes, yet still depend heavily on individual champions, temporary funding, informal relationships and people who know how to navigate complex internal systems. From the outside, the university may have all the hallmarks of an innovative institution. For those trying to develop and implement new ideas within it, the experience can be very different.
This distinction between innovation activity and innovation capability is at the heart our UIIN’s latest whitepaper, The Innovative University: From isolated activity to institutional capability.
The whitepaper looks beyond hard numbers – programmes, projects or outputs an institution can point to – and proposes a broader way of thinking about and assessing university innovation. It asks what needs to be in place for universities to repeatedly turn ideas into practice, learn from what happens, and build on what works. We use this as the basis for understanding innovation as an institutional capability: something that can be developed, strengthened and sustained across the university.
What is an innovative university?
Start-ups, patents, partnerships, new technologies and entrepreneurship programmes are often taken as signs of an innovative university. They certainly show that innovation is happening somewhere in the institution. What they cannot tell us on their own is how easily that innovation happens, how widely it is supported, or whether the university has learned how to sustain it.
We define an innovative university as one that has built the strategic, cultural and organisational capability to generate, test, apply, translate and scale new ideas over time. Those ideas may create value through education and research, through the economy and society, or through the university’s contribution to its wider community and environment.
Innovation becomes an institutional capability when people can move an idea forward without needing exceptional persistence, personal connections or insider knowledge. Support is visible and accessible, successful approaches can travel beyond the teams or departments where they began, and lessons from both success and failure feed back into how the university works. Over time, this makes innovation less dependent on individual effort and more embedded in the institution itself. This is what gives a university the capacity to innovate repeatedly, rather than through isolated pockets of activity.
For university leaders, counting innovation activities only goes so far. The more revealing question is whether the institution has created the conditions in which new ideas can repeatedly make their way into practice.
University innovation is broader than entrepreneurship and commercialisation
Innovation in universities is unfortunately still frequently associated with technology transfer, start-ups, spinouts and entrepreneurship. While those activities matter, they represent only part of the picture.
In education, it can mean redesigning curricula, experimenting with new forms of learning or finding better ways to help students apply knowledge in uncertain environments. In research, it can involve new forms of interdisciplinary inquiry, stronger links between knowledge and practice, or different ways of working with external stakeholders.
Valorisation provides another route, turning knowledge and expertise into economic and societal value through commercialisation, policy, professional practice, public engagement, new services and ventures. Innovation also happens through place, the university’s role in its surrounding region. Its knowledge, people, infrastructure and convening power can all contribute to cities, communities and wider innovation ecosystems.
The innovative university gives us a way to look across these different forms of activity as parts of the same institutional question: how well can the university turn ideas and knowledge into something that can be used, developed and carried further?
Why do universities struggle to become more innovative?
Universities are rarely short of ideas or people willing to pursue them. The difficulty is turning what already works in pockets of the institution into something more widely supported and repeatable. Across our research and work with universities, several recurring barriers appear.
Innovation may feature prominently in university strategies without being fully reflected in how the institution operates. Engagement, entrepreneurship, knowledge exchange and experimentation may feature prominently in strategy, while promotion criteria, workload models and internal measures continue to reward a much narrower set of activities. That gap makes it harder for innovation to become part of everyday academic work.
The support itself can also be extensive yet difficult to navigate. A university may have research services, partnership teams, entrepreneurship support, legal expertise, funding programmes and impact specialists, while academics and external partners still struggle to work out where to begin.
Innovation pathways are frequently fragmented as well. An idea may pass through several different parts of the university as it develops, each responsible for a different stage of the process. Those functions can work well individually and still produce a fragmented experience overall, with handovers, responsibilities and next steps unclear to the people trying to move something forward.
And much innovation still depends on champions: These are the people who know the system, have the right relationships and are persistent enough to navigate around its friction. Their achievements deserve recognition. But when ordinary progress depends on extraordinary individual effort, the underlying institutional capability remains weak.
From innovation infrastructure to innovation capability
Universities have invested significantly in innovation infrastructure over the past two decades. The problem is that much of it still operates as a collection of separate structures and services, with limited connection between them.
UIIN’s Innovation Maturity Framework identifies six institutional capabilities that help assess how deeply innovation is embedded between them.
- Direction concerns whether the university has a shared understanding of why innovation matters and how it connects to institutional purpose.
- Empowerment looks at whether staff, students and partners feel authorised, recognised and supported to participate.
- Scaffolding concerns the structures, roles and pathways that help ideas move across institutional boundaries.
- Enablement asks whether the support that exists is actually visible, usable and reliable from the perspective of the people trying to access it.
- Reciprocity focuses on whether innovation and partnership create mutual value rather than becoming transactional or extractive.
- Evolution reflects the university’s ability to learn from experience, adapt and renew itself as conditions change.
While each individual capability matters, none of these capabilities operates in isolation. Their strength depends heavily on how they reinforce one another.
An ambitious innovation strategy, for example, will achieve little if staff lack the time, incentives or support to act on it. New structures may add capacity and still make the system harder to navigate. Strong external partnerships can generate substantial activity without necessarily changing how the institution learns or works internally.
This is exactly why we need to move beyond ticking boxes around strategies, mechanisms, structures and activities, and assess a university’s innovation maturity as a university as a whole.
What is university innovation maturity?
University innovation maturity describes how far the conditions that support innovation have become established across the institution. At lower levels of maturity, progress often depends on informal relationships, individual initiative and local knowledge. As maturity develops, support becomes more coherent, easier to access and less dependent on particular people. This does not require every part of the university to work in the same way.
Maturity will rarely be uniform across an institution. A university may have sophisticated research translation capabilities while innovation in education remains fragmented. One department may have longstanding and well-managed external partnerships, while another is only beginning to develop them. Institutional mission, disciplinary differences and local context will inevitably shape what maturity looks like in practice.
The purpose of this maturity model is not to create another university ranking, there are enough of those. Its value lies in making the institution easier to understand, showing where innovation depends on particular individuals, where ideas get stuck, if strategy and incentives contract each other, and where support exist but remains difficult to access.
UIIN’s framework describes five stages of maturity: Emerging, Developing, Establishing, Scaling and Leading. They provide a way of understanding how institutional capability develops over time and where further work may be needed. Universities can use them to locate different strengths and weaknesses across the institution without assuming that innovation follows a single or perfectly linear path.
What should university leaders focus on?
For university leaders, much of the work now sits beneath the programmes, centres and funding schemes that tend to receive the most attention.
Innovation becomes more sustainable when the systems shaping everyday university life support it. Workload models, promotion criteria, internal funding and leadership priorities all influence whether staff have the time and incentive to pursue new ideas as part of their role.
The routes through the institution matter too. Academics, students and external partners should be able to understand how an idea moves forward without relying on personal contacts or detailed knowledge of university structures. Legal, finance, procurement, research support and communications teams all shape that journey. Bringing these functions into the process earlier can prevent them becoming hurdles at the point when an idea is already well developed. External partnerships deserve the same attention. Their quality matters more than the number an institution can report. Strong partnerships need enough flexibility and trust for both sides to see value in continuing them.
Universities also need to get better at learning from what they already do. Pilots and programmes generate experience, but that learning can easily remain within the team or project that produced it. More mature institutions use it to decide what deserves further investment, what needs to change and what has run its course.
None of this is as visible as a new start-up, patent or flagship programme. It is, however, what determines whether innovation can survive beyond individual projects and people. For leaders, the task is to reduce the friction around innovation and make the conditions supporting it part of how the university normally works.
The innovative university is able to renew what matters
Universities are among society’s most enduring institutions. Much of their value comes from their ability to preserve knowledge, question it and carry it forward. But endurance does not automatically create adaptability.
Technologies, learner expectations, labour markets, research environments and societal challenges all continue to change. Staying relevant depends on whether universities can respond without losing sight of their academic purpose.
That capacity for renewal sits at the heart of the innovative university. It is less about rankings or the size of an innovation portfolio, and more about creating the conditions for teaching, research, partnerships and systems to evolve as the world around them changes.
Explore the Innovation Maturity Framework
The Innovative University: From isolated activity to institutional capability explores this argument in much greater depth.
The whitepaper introduces UIIN’s Innovation Maturity Framework, the six capabilities that underpin institutional innovation, a five-stage maturity journey and examples of how universities are putting these ideas into practice.
Luca Barbera (author) is a Project Officer at UIIN.
Arno Meerman (author) is the CEO of UIIN.
