How do you and your organization define innovation?

In our organization, we define innovation as the process of improving or replacing something. We've moved away from the notion of invention and towards making things better to bring efficiencies, whether it's cost savings or improving services. Innovation is becoming part of our culture, a continuous effort to enhance our legacy systems and services.

Continuous innovation should be a cultural attribute rather than the responsibility of a specific team. It's about creating an environment that fosters creativity and new ideas through everyday activities and operations. Most innovation happens incrementally, not necessarily through sudden, groundbreaking ideas. I learned from Steve Jobs that you don't have to create a physical product to be an innovator; you can innovate within your organization by streamlining operations and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Innovation can be applied to products, processes, and people. For instance, at our university, we're creating a "degree plus" program, where students work with us from their sophomore year and graduate with an industry-based certificate in addition to their degree. This approach not only broadens their career options but also helps us develop a diverse talent pipeline. We also focus on in-place innovation or continuous improvement, where we aim to deliver services better tomorrow than we do today. We also engage in disruptive innovation, like AI, by harnessing the strengths of our campus community and funding innovative ideas.

While innovation can involve invention and improvement, its focus should be on the application and implementation of ideas in a way that generates value. It can be incremental or radical, but the ultimate goal is to create new ways to generate value.