The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

by Clayton M. Christensen

Historically, higher education has avoided such competitive disruption. There are several reasons for this past immunity. One is the power of prestige in the higher education marketplace, where the quality of the product is hard to measure. In the absence of comparable measures of what universities produce for their students, the well-respected institutions have a natural advantage; because they have been admired in the past, they are presumed to be the best choice for the future. A related stabilizing force is the barrier to disruptive innovation created by accreditation, a process by which representatives of established universities periodically participate in judging the fitness of established institutions and would-be newcomers. In doing so, they tended to apply the standards of practice in their own institutions. Thus, conformance to tradition became the price of continued accreditation and of entry to the industry. Another reason for the lack of disruption in higher education has been the absence of a disruptive technology. Since the time that universities first gathered students into classrooms, the learning technologies—lectures, textbooks, oral and written examinations—have remained largely the same. Even when computers were introduced into the classroom, they were used to enhance the existing instructional approaches rather than to supplant them. Lectures, for example, were augmented with computer graphics, but the lecture itself persisted in its fundamental form...