The innovative university: How UCD is building the culture and institutional capacity to change
What helps a university become more innovative in its everyday work?
In this episode, Eleanor Kelly, Head of Strategy and Partnerships at UCD Innovation Academy, explains how small changes in everyday work can create evidence, shared language, and momentum across a large institution.
You can listen to the conversation on our podcast or read the summary below:
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Summary
Universities are expected to respond to changing employment, tighter public finances, artificial intelligence, and complex social challenges, yet their internal systems often leave little room for experimentation. Innovation is frequently associated with start-ups, commercialisation, or new technology. An institution can perform strongly in those areas while its staff still struggle to change established ways of working.
Eleanor Kelly, Head of Strategy and Partnerships at the UCD Innovation Academy, University College Dublin, sees institutional innovation as a capability that must be developed across the university. Her experience suggests that change begins with how people define problems, collaborate, use time, and learn through action. Structures can support that work, but an innovative culture depends on staff having the confidence, practical skills, and organisational permission to work differently.
The risk of inaction is changing the case for innovation
Universities operate largely as public sector institutions. This gives them the reach to address major problems and create change at scale, while exposing them to constraints that differ from those faced by start-ups or private companies. Political and media scrutiny can make experimentation feel risky, particularly when a failed initiative may become a public story.
Eleanor believes that the balance of risk is shifting. Financial pressure is increasing as higher education competes with other public priorities. At the same time, AI and automation are changing graduate employment and prompting students to question the return on a university education. Staff are also experiencing rapid changes in how learning is designed and delivered.
The risk really is inaction.
This does not mean importing a language of disruption and speed without regard for the university’s public purpose. It means recognising that familiar processes can also create risk when the environment changes faster than the institution. Universities need to invest in the capabilities of the people who keep the organisation moving, including professional staff and educators, so they can adapt their work while maintaining the responsibilities of a public institution.
UCD Innovation Academy began in 2010 by addressing a related gap between what PhD students learned at university and how prepared they were to create value after graduation. It now works with around 1,600 learners, including approximately 1,200 UCD undergraduates, as well as PhD students, postgraduate learners, public sector organisations, and industry. This range allows ideas developed with one group to inform work with another and gives the Academy a practical view of how innovation capability travels across settings.
A shared focus on problems makes innovation accessible
Innovation language can alienate people who associate it with technology, product development, or specialist teams. Terms such as design thinking can have the same effect. Eleanor makes the concept more relevant by focusing on a recognisable activity: changing an existing situation into a preferred one.
Many university staff already do this in teaching, research administration, student services, timetabling, and other essential functions. Framing innovation as purposeful problem-solving helps them recognise capabilities they already use, while opening those capabilities to more deliberate development.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
The question is a working mantra at the Innovation Academy. It challenges the common instruction to bring solutions rather than problems, which can discourage people from examining why an issue exists. When leaders use the question consistently, staff gain permission to slow down before committing resources to an answer.
Eleanor describes work with a government department that wanted an information campaign to encourage policymakers to follow a piece of legislation. Conversations with the people doing the work showed that they already understood the requirement. They were avoiding it because it slowed their process. The proposed campaign addressed a lack of awareness that did not exist; the real issue concerned the legislation and its practical effects.
The example shows why insight matters. A modest effort to understand people’s behaviour can change the problem an organisation is trying to solve. It also demonstrates how a human-centred approach becomes useful when translated into a clear question and applied to a live institutional challenge.
Training needs time and permission to change practice
Universities often support staff to attend courses in innovation, creative thinking, or design. The value disappears quickly when participants return to a full workload with no time, resources, or managerial backing to use what they learned. Treating attendance as the complete intervention leaves capability isolated within individuals.
Often we have public sector innovators who take some of our programs in innovation or creative thinking and problem-solving, and then they go back to their day job. There is no space or resourcing or support for them to action what they have learned.
Eleanor argues for investment in people that extends beyond skills. Teams need a mindset that supports curiosity and open-mindedness, shared language that makes problem exploration acceptable, and practical opportunities to apply new approaches. Managers must create space for that application and recognise that experimentation forms part of the work.
The same principle applies to collaboration. Eleanor participated in a cross-university professional group formed around a shared objective. Once the group completed its task, its members chose to continue because the relationships they had built were valuable in their own right. Across a large university, those connections create capacity for future problems that have not yet emerged.
It’s also about creating the space and the time and the connection with your colleagues.
This makes collaboration part of institutional preparedness. A group may produce an immediate output, while also building trust and familiarity across functions. Preserving those relationships reduces the effort required to assemble expertise when the next challenge appears.
Small experiments build evidence and confidence
Universities do not need a complete innovation architecture before people can act. Eleanor cautions against assuming that a particular lab, team, methodology, or organisational structure will create the culture by itself. Vision, skills, mindset, resources, and leadership all contribute, but waiting for a perfect arrangement can delay useful work.
The bias to the action, to just doing something, trying it, testing it, iterating it, is the surest way to get an innovation culture going in your organisation.
A focused intervention can create evidence that supports further investment. Staff might convene colleagues from different disciplines, prototype an approach, or redesign part of a process. Even a modest success gives decision-makers something concrete to assess and gives practitioners a story they can use to explain the value of experimentation.
Meetings offer a low-cost place to begin. A team can turn a conventional 60- or 90-minute agenda into a facilitated design session. The result may be an improved answer, a clearer understanding of the problem, or renewed energy among colleagues. Someone needs the skills to guide the session, but that capability can be developed through a short course and then shared through repeated use.
Describing these activities clearly also matters. When teams name prototypes, iterations, insights, and experiments, they establish a vocabulary that others can adopt. Stories about small successes help staff see innovation as relevant to their roles and create a visible pattern of practice across the institution.
Culture grows through leadership and distributed action
Institutional change needs support from both senior leaders and people working throughout the university. At UCD, Eleanor connects the university’s ambitious strategy under President Orla Feely with an acknowledgement that creativity and innovation are necessary amid wider change. Leadership can establish direction, provide resources, and signal that new approaches are legitimate.
Local action gives that direction practical form. Staff can introduce better questions, redesign meetings, build alliances within departments, and make successful experiments visible. A small group of colleagues who share an understanding of design-led problem-solving can help the approach spread more reliably than isolated training for one or two people.
It’s a change from the bottom-up and the top-down that’s necessary.
Culture also develops unevenly. Eleanor describes it as an ongoing journey with peaks and troughs in the time and attention available. Universities must continue delivering classes, research, timetables, and essential services while trying new practices. Change-makers therefore need realistic expectations and a steady rhythm of action rather than treating innovation as a one-off programme.
The broader purpose is to prepare the university for problems it cannot yet predict. Knowledge remains central to higher education, but students and staff also need the skills and mindset to create value as circumstances change. For Eleanor Kelly, institutional innovation grows when universities invest in people, give them room to act, and preserve the relationships through which new ideas become shared capacity.
Ready for more?
How can universities equip researchers with the skills and confidence to collaborate beyond academia? UIIN’s bespoke training programme, Impactful Academics, helps institutions strengthen researchers’ capabilities in external engagement, communication, and collaboration.
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