The year is 2025 and the following is an account of how the UK higher education sector fared following the 2012 fees rise, a period now referred to euphemistically as 'the era of continuous deferral': "Many universities were confronted with disturbing symptoms, which could not be remedied by available management techniques and which had no precedent in recent experience. For some universities the market demand began to level off and could not be restimulated even by the most energetic marketing and promotion. For others the demand began to decline in the face of substitute products offered by new technologies. Still others saw their traditional markets invaded by vigorous foreign competitors."
Believable? I think so. Yet these words were actually written four decades ago to describe the situation faced by big US corporates (coal, motor, steel) in the face of unprecedented competition from overseas. All I did was substitute 'university' for 'firm', a heresy sure to lose some readers – but stay with me. The author was Igor Ansoff, ex-vice president at the RAND corporation, maths graduate and distinguished business school academic.
Ansoff examined how US industry responded to the changing economic environment and market conditions in some detail. His conclusion, summarised in his 1965 book Corporate Strategy was that in times of discontinuous change – such as that faced by American industry in the 1950s – the key to survival was for management to embrace and promote entrepreneurial behaviour.
Ansoff recognised that the university (sorry, firm) relates to its environment through both its operational and strategic behaviours. Where the required change is discontinuous-strategic then entrepreneurship requires elevation from a secondary to primary role. But a critical entrepreneurial trait is the necessity of failure. Sir Ken Robinson made this point strongly in his 2006 critique of creativity in schools: "If you're not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with anything original." If you do nothing else today, watch his Ted talk.
None of us would be teaching in universities if we had failed our exams. By definition our managerial culture and reward systems are borne from a conveyor belt process of passing more and more, and failing (in an academic sense) less and less. Here lies a massive contradiction at the heart of the entrepreneurial university. For entrepreneurs to make expert decisions they must first make the mistakes that allow them to explore new, creative approaches to problem solving.
Peter Simms summarises this dilemma well in his Harvard Business Review blog, The No. 1 enemy of creativity: fear of failure. Rarely as managers are we gifted the single biggest learning experience valued most by entrepreneurs: permission to fail. Add to this a widespread fear of falling foul of the various regulatory bodies circling overhead and it's hardly surprising senior teams err on the side of caution and stay risk adverse.
I believe this is broadly where the UK higher education sector is now. If so, then management, frankly, needs help adapting. And there is acknowledgement of this. The Entrepreneurial University Leaders Programme, run by Universities UK, the National Centre for Entrepreneuship in Education and the Said Business School is designed specifically to help senior managers develop a more entrepreneurial approach.
But are universities capable of adapting their teaching and learning strategies and management styles to accommodate higher degrees of entrepreneurial behaviour even if they want to? Can managers learn to move away from the current drive to fulfil goals and search instead for new opportunities? Will leaders inspire people to accept change rather than just do more of the same? Are we really prepared to reward creativity and initiative rather than past performance? Together this is the antidote prescribed by Ansoff to counteract the fever brought on by external change. My guess is that for some the medicine may be too strong.
Encouragingly there is a renewed emphasis and recognition on teaching and learning side. Those who consider 'enterprising QAA' an oxymoron should take a look at its recent report, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education, which calls for greater innovation in both across the curriculum.
Our answer is to embed more fully our social entrepreneurship agenda at undergraduate level, not through formal routes but in providing students space to fail. One example is our We Do Ideas project, where freshers bid for seed capital of up to £2000 to launch a social enterprise that will literally live or die in the market place. It is this kind of experiential learning that Colin Mason, professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde, argued for recently.
There will be those in academia who want absolutely nothing to do with any of this, either in the lecture room or dished out from above by senior managers. Of course public universities in the UK are not the same as American firms in the post war years. But I believe we can learn something from Ansoff that could help the sector to rewrite the future.
Nick Petford is vice chancellor of the University of Northampton – follow him on Twitter @nick_petford
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