Author: Albert B Blixt and Laurance N Smith

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Strategic Innovation is the future of higher education.

For a period of almost fifty years, from 1945 until the early 1990s, higher education was on an ascent. These “golden years” saw the vast expansion of the opportunity to attend college with the coming the community college system, the GI Bill, and generous state support that made college affordable for a new generation of upwardly mobile Americans.

Almost imperceptibly, support for higher education as a public good diminished. In the last 25 years, demographic, economic, and technological changes have raised questions about what it takes to succeed as a higher education. The very structures, assumptions, beliefs, and strategies that served higher education well in good times are exactly what makes it hard for colleges and universities to adapt in a world of accelerating change.

This book is based on the premise that culture can be shifted to become an ally of change - if leaders are prepared to do what it takes. Al Blixt and Laurence Smith explore leadership initiatives that executives can enact so their institutions can survive in the present and thrive in the future.