The Innovation Connundrum

More are more boards are pushing their heads of school for "innovation", often bemoaning the slow pace of change in our very conservative field. At the same time, we often observe what Linda A. Hill and George Davis write about in the Harvard Business Review when summarizing a survey of corporate governance:

"Most board members report that the lion’s share of their attention around innovation goes toward improving the organization’s capacity to execute its current strategy—that is, innovation to sustain the core."

This is often where boards focus: how to do what schools do faster, better, or cheaper. Yet the combination of these three--faster, better, and cheaper--won't happen with incremental or marginal improvements. That's not real innovation! Real innovation will come from new business models, new ways to teach and to learn, and to finally making the school experience render obsolete our dependence on a fixed number of students and teachers and classrooms.Maybe it is time for our governance to look beyond the incremental and push management not to fix problems, but to invent new models.