Planning for Innovation and Disruption in a Global Environment

Higher education faces its greatest combinations of challenges: economic uncertainty, accountability and globalization: overlaid by emerging technologies. University leaders face the twin trials of dramatic decreases in public financial support and the increasing cost of resources to avoid technological obsolescence. Technologies continue to evolve that will disrupt higher education in the future. The challenge for traditional universities whose concentration historically has been the production of knowledge in the form of human capital, research, and scholarship is to be able to tap into the expanding need for lifelong learning. Access to higher education will be a necessity for job mobility and economic success. Survival for universities requires modification and adaptation. Traditional educational paradigms have changed and the physical university is now a combination multi-dimensional education model. All these changes demand planning, specifically strategic planning, if higher education institutions are to be competitive and ultimately successful.