The first responds to some of your concerns Chris, “Collaboration, though, both in teaching and learning, is rarely institutionalized at an administrative level.” This is one of the main effects I see of the “corporate managerial stuff” – the individualisation of learning and teaching, where all measures and structures relate only to the individual. This to me is one of the core problems to the top-down approach. There is the possibility for innovation – but on such a tiny capacity that it will forever remain a blip. By building greater cultural capacity to collaborate we can start to build in the day to day innovation – which feeds into second idea – the collective.

“communities are built around a sense of belonging, whereas collectives are built around participation. Collectives are “content-neutral platforms” with facilitating peer-to-peer learning as their reason for existing (53). According to Thomas and Brown, “collectives scale in an almost unlimited way” (53), because they are built around shared practice and are inherently nodal.”

This would seem to offer another model to for innovation which would fit your idea of view of Universities as complex adaptive systems.

Now we get into the technology component. This is where social media and social spaces – blogs, google+ etc – can enable the collective. However, when we want to institute actual technological innovations then the exiting IT model wont work. From mine, and your experiences by the sounds of it, their priorities are too different/ They need to be risk adverse and stable – innovation needs adaption and agility. So perhaps the skunkworks component isn’t a bunch of academics, but a group of technologist that can enable the collective. The two models operating in tandem….

Just ideas at the moment, need more rigour and exploration to be honest – so would welcome an opportunity to explore further with you. I think gaining across-institutional perspective could be really beneficial.

Transcript of that talk is here – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wDi__KOWL8TVZ0ugaf5RqYfSzTl1RiFF0hGh1wJ9L-s/edit

Can (how would) innovation be embedded into “day to day business”? Can you see the roles, structures and even technologies that currently exist allowing this to happen? Or, would the day to day business overwhelm the innovation. e.g. could a IT department that gets hauled over the coals when the LMS is unavailable for 20 minutes, engage in innovation?

I’m sure Chris’ response – and those in the disruptive innovation literature – would be no to most of the above. The problems involved are essentially why the Skunkworks approach seems to be the way to go.

I have the vague (and perhaps fatally flawed) view that with a bit of tweaking of the roles, structures, technologies and cultures involved with institutional e-learning there may be some hope. In part, based on the view of Universities as complex adaptive systems where small changes in initial conditions can create big outcomes. But I’m also pessimistic enough to think that the increasingly top-down, enterprise approaches being adopted within Universities are treating and can only see the institutions as a simple ordered system. The intertia may be too great.

So, at the moment I’m only aiming to tweak the system enough to let me do some interesting things and document the impacts of these changes and the costs of the broader system not changing.

Actually, a bit of cross-institutional comparative research could be interesting around this. Interested?