Entrepreneurial leadership in higher education: How leaders can drive change

How can higher education leaders turn innovative ambition into lasting institutional change?

In this episode, Chris Howard, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Arizona State University, explores the role of mission, organisational design, aligned incentives, and clear mandates. He also shares how root-cause thinking and continuous learning can help universities expand access and improve outcomes. Read the article or listen to the episode for Chris’s perspective on leading innovation in higher education:

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Summary

Entrepreneurial leadership in higher education is often associated with bold ideas, new programmes, or an individual leader’s appetite for risk. Chris Howard, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Arizona State University, presents a more systemic view. His career across the military, corporate sector, government service, and several types of university has taught him that change depends on perspective, but also on the institutional conditions that allow different perspectives to become useful.

At Arizona State University, those conditions begin with a charter focused on inclusion, outcomes, public-value research, and responsibility for the communities the institution serves. They extend into organisational architecture, incentives, technology, partnerships, and a willingness to examine root causes. Chris’s experience suggests that entrepreneurial leaders create momentum by connecting these elements around a shared mission, rather than asking innovation to depend on personal force alone.

Mission gives entrepreneurial activity a direction

Chris’s path into higher education was unconventional. Before joining the University of Oklahoma, he trained at the United States Air Force Academy, completed postgraduate work at Oxford, served in military intelligence and special operations, worked at Bristol Myers Squibb and General Electric, and attended Harvard Business School. He later led Hampden-Sydney College and Robert Morris University before joining Arizona State University.

Across those environments, purpose provided continuity. His early desire to serve his country influenced later decisions, while his experience in different sectors gave him several ways to approach institutional problems. Entrepreneurial leadership, in this account, begins with knowing the mission that those perspectives are intended to advance.

ASU’s charter supplies that direction at institutional scale. Chris describes a university that judges itself through the people it includes and their outcomes, pursues research of public value, and accepts responsibility for its surrounding communities. This turns innovation into a means of delivering a defined public purpose.

We judge ourselves by whom we include and their outcomes as opposed to whom we exclude.

The charter also challenges conventional measures of prestige that reward demand and exclusivity. ASU combines access, scale, and excellence through online and campus-based education, K–12 provision, and opportunities for people who are upskilling or reskilling. Its entrepreneurial activity supports this commitment by widening the routes through which learners can participate and succeed.

Diverse experience is most useful when it joins the institution

Leaders entering higher education from another sector can see assumptions that insiders may take for granted. Chris brought experience of corporate planning, military operations, public service, and executive leadership into academic settings. That difference created useful questions, although it also produced early mistakes when he presented practices from General Electric too forcefully to faculty colleagues.

The lesson was to contribute a different view without allowing it to dominate. Academic institutions contain distinct forms of expertise, authority, and professional motivation. An entrepreneurial leader needs to understand those perspectives and add another angle to the discussion, creating a blend strong enough to address problems that rarely belong to one discipline or function.

This ability matters because university executives face challenges beyond the experience of any single career path. Enrolment, financial sustainability, research, student outcomes, public expectations, technology, and partnerships intersect. Leaders who have seen different organisational models can recognise useful parallels, while still adapting their language and approach to the culture in which they are operating.

Context remains decisive. Chris found an especially strong fit at ASU because its long-established design aspirations and charter already attracted people with varied backgrounds. The institution did not require him to act as a lone outsider; it gave many people permission to think across conventional boundaries.

Organisational design creates room for innovation

ASU describes itself as a public enterprise. Its academic and learning enterprises sit alongside a knowledge enterprise that elevates research within the institution, while enterprise-level leaders work across functions to support opportunities that do not belong wholly within one part of the university.

Chris sees this structure as an ecosystem that provides flexibility and degrees of freedom. It allows leaders to pursue global work, military partnerships, corporate education, and other initiatives while supporting the university’s day-to-day academic responsibilities. Organisational architecture therefore becomes an enabling mechanism, creating space to explore ideas without requiring every activity to follow the same operating path.

Financial reality reinforces that entrepreneurial capacity. ASU’s operating budget is much larger than its direct state allocation, so tuition, fees, partnerships, and other activity help the university fulfil the ambitions of its charter. The resulting enterprise model connects revenue generation to the institution’s public mission.

This design developed over time from a distinct philosophy of the university. Chris contrasts the exclusive traditions of older institutions with ASU’s effort to combine scale, accessibility, and excellence. Its architecture reflects that choice, demonstrating how an institutional model can be designed around the outcomes it intends to produce.

Root causes turn public responsibility into practical systems

Entrepreneurial institutions can spend their energy managing symptoms or develop systems that address the conditions beneath them. Chris points to ASU’s work in K–12 education as an example. When leaders were dissatisfied with educational outcomes in Arizona, the university created online provision and charter schools that now serve as learning environments for improving practice across the educational continuum.

The model gives ASU an opportunity to test technology and learning approaches before students reach university. Immersive tools developed for higher education can be introduced into primary and secondary settings, while the institution learns how to strengthen outcomes across what Chris describes as a K–20 system.

ASU applied a similar logic to health. Asked to consider Arizona’s health and medical needs, leaders designed a wider health-learning ecosystem rather than treating a medical school as a complete response. The system includes medicine and medical engineering, public health technology, nursing, health solutions, and partnerships with healthcare organisations. Its organising question concerns better outcomes for people across urban, rural, and Native American communities.

These examples show how mission can guide institutional expansion. The university takes responsibility for a public challenge, investigates the underlying system, and builds capabilities that connect education, research, technology, and external partners.

Change requires mandate, incentives, and institutional learning

Innovation creates resistance because it changes established work, identities, and distributions of resources. Chris advises leaders to expect pushback and to understand the authority behind their role before moving too far ahead.

If you’re not getting some pushback, you’re probably not doing it right.

A president recruited to lead change needs clear backing from the board. Executives and administrators need equivalent support from the people to whom they report. Leaders should stress-test their mandate, particularly when their appointment or brief appears to promise more authority than the institution will support in practice.

They also need to understand how different university communities define success. A faculty member, finance professional, administrator, and student may respond to the same proposal through different priorities. Finding common ground creates the possibility of sustained change. ASU’s early expansion of online education illustrates this principle: departments could retain the margin generated by their programmes and reinvest it in their work, aligning institutional innovation with local benefit and academic choice.

Entrepreneurial capacity itself can be learned. Chris encourages leaders to study their institution, the discipline of innovation, and relevant examples, then contextualise what they learn. The same learning mindset applies to students and to the university as a whole.

Everybody is a master learner.

ASU offers multiple routes into and through education, including honours study, veteran support, corporate education, universal learner courses, online and hybrid formats, and continued access to learning. It also examines where learners are struggling and asks how the system can improve. For Chris Howard, entrepreneurial leadership ultimately serves people who have fewer resources and opportunities, using institutional learning and innovation to help them contribute in ways they may not previously have imagined.

Ready for more?

Entrepreneurial leadership is not simply about launching new initiatives. It is about aligning people, structures, incentives, and partnerships around a clear institutional purpose that creates value for learners, communities, and society.

• Building the entrepreneurial university: Leadership lessons from Aalto’s founding president explores how institutional leaders can shape entrepreneurial cultures, challenge traditional assumptions, and create the conditions needed for long-term transformation. The article offers valuable insights into the role of leadership in building universities that are both innovative and mission-driven.
• What if we designed the university from scratch? Lessons from Minerva examines how university structures, learning experiences, and assessment systems can be intentionally designed around the capabilities graduates need to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Like Chris Howard’s perspective, it highlights the importance of aligning institutional design with educational purpose.

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