By Melissa Morriss-Olson
Innovation is a word we use easily in higher education. It appears in strategic plans, presidential speeches, accreditation narratives, and fundraising priorities. We talk about it as if its importance is self-evident—and perhaps it is. But despite the rhetoric, innovation fails far more often than it succeeds.
I don’t make that claim from a distance. I make it after watching the same dynamics play out, in different forms, across institutions and leadership roles, over time.
I’ve spent much of my career working inside institutions that genuinely wanted to innovate. I’ve led large-scale change efforts, helped launch new academic programs, and worked alongside presidents, provosts, faculty leaders, and boards who understood that the old models were under strain. I’ve also spent years in deep conversation with higher education leaders through IngenioUs, listening to them reflect—often candidly—on what innovation has demanded of them and where it has fallen short.
From this vantage point, I don’t believe innovation fails because higher education lacks intelligence, creativity, or commitment to mission. It fails because institutions consistently underestimate what innovation requires—and because some of our most familiar leadership habits actively work against it.
One of the most common misunderstandings is the belief that innovation is an event. A launch. A new program. A bold announcement.
In reality, innovation is a practice. It is iterative, uneven, and deeply human.
I’ve seen institutions enthusiastically greenlight new ideas only to lose confidence when the early versions didn’t look the way they had imagined. Enrollment was slower than hoped. Processes were clunky. Faculty were still learning how to teach or lead in new ways. In more than one instance, an initiative was paused or quietly sidelined not because it wasn’t working, but because it hadn’t yet worked enough.
The discomfort of not knowing—of sitting with ambiguity—proved harder to tolerate than the original problem the innovation was meant to address.
Innovation rarely fails at the beginning. It fails in the middle, when certainty gives way to learning and leaders start to wonder whether the risk is worth it.
Another pattern I see repeatedly is the tendency to equate innovation with addition. New programs. New credentials. New initiatives layered on top of already full institutional lives.
What is far less common is the willingness to subtract.
Faculty and staff are often asked to innovate while carrying the same workloads, expectations, and accountability structures. Sometimes more. Innovation becomes something to be done in addition to everything else, rather than as a reallocation of energy and attention.
In my own leadership experience, the innovations that endured were the ones accompanied by real choices. We stopped doing some things. We questioned legacy practices. We aligned structures and resources with stated priorities. Innovation was treated as core work, not discretionary effort.
When leaders are unwilling to ask, “If this truly matters, what are we prepared to stop doing?” innovation remains aspirational rather than operational.
There is also a dimension of innovation failure that is rarely acknowledged directly: the emotional cost of change.
Innovation challenges identities. It disrupts expertise. It calls into question long-held assumptions about what higher education is supposed to look like and how authority is exercised. Resistance is often framed as a barrier to overcome, when it is frequently a signal of loss.
In many IngenioUs conversations, leaders have reflected on moments when they initially experienced resistance as obstruction, only to realize later that it was grief—grief for programs being sunset, roles being reshaped, or professional identities that no longer felt secure.
Innovation fails when leaders rush past those emotions to maintain momentum. Logic and data matter, but they are rarely sufficient on their own. People don’t need to agree with every decision, but they do need to feel respected and understood in the process.
To be clear, this is not an easy moment to lead. Institutions are navigating financial pressure, political scrutiny, regulatory complexity, and a level of public skepticism that many leaders have never experienced before. The impulse to seek certainty, reduce risk, and avoid visible missteps is understandable—but it is precisely in this context that innovation is most vulnerable.
Where I see innovation most consistently break down today is in the combination of consensus-seeking and risk aversion.
Higher education values deliberation and shared governance, and rightly so. But somewhere along the way, consensus has become confused with leadership, and risk reduction has become a proxy for responsibility.
I have watched genuinely strong ideas stall as leaders sought broader agreement—not to improve the ideas, but to make them safer. The discomfort generated by disagreement, uncertainty, or visible dissent felt too risky. And so momentum slowed. Language softened. The edges were smoothed.
Eventually, what remained was something nearly everyone could accept—but few felt compelled to champion.
In these moments, consensus becomes a form of protection. If everyone agrees, no one is exposed. If risk is minimized, no one must absorb the consequences. Leadership becomes procedural rather than intentional.
But innovation does not emerge from comfort. It emerges from informed risk-taking.
Every meaningful innovation carries risk—financial, reputational, cultural, or political. The goal is not to eliminate risk, but to understand it, manage it, and decide which risks are worth taking in service of mission.
What I see too often are leaders who default to risk avoidance rather than risk discernment. They ask, “How do we make this safer?” instead of “What are we willing to risk in order to learn?” They seek certainty where none exists and consensus where leadership is required.
Good ideas don’t fail because they generate disagreement. They fail because no one is willing to stand behind them long enough for learning to occur.
Leadership in innovative contexts requires a different posture. It requires leaders who are willing to say, “I’ve listened carefully. I understand the concerns. And I still believe this is worth testing.” It requires the courage to lean into discomfort on behalf of ideas that matter—to absorb criticism, tolerate ambiguity, and protect fragile initiatives through their earliest stages.
Consensus has a role, but it should follow learning, not precede it. Innovation benefits from diverse perspectives informing action, not from universal agreement determining whether action is allowed at all.
Another quiet innovation killer is an overreliance on permission. Institutions convince themselves they must wait—until policies are clarified, structures finalized, budgets fully secured, and risks eliminated.
But innovation rarely emerges from perfect conditions. It emerges from purposeful action within constraints.
Some of the most meaningful innovation I’ve been part of happened when leaders asked different questions: What can we responsibly test now? Where do we have discretion to learn? Momentum came not from certainty, but from clarity of intent.
When innovation waits for permission from every corner of the institution, momentum dissipates—and belief along with it. External forces are real, but they are often invoked more broadly than they need to be, becoming a rationale for delay rather than a constraint to be navigated.
Innovation also falters when it lives at the margins, disconnected from strategy. When it is framed as a pilot or side project rather than as a necessary response to real institutional challenges—student success, access, relevance, sustainability—it becomes expendable.
In contrast, the institutions that innovate successfully tie their efforts directly to mission and strategy. Innovation is not positioned as optional. It is positioned as essential.
Finally, innovation fails when leaders underestimate the kind of leadership it requires.
Innovative leadership is not charismatic or dramatic. It is steady. It is also quietly courageous—because it asks leaders to absorb risk on behalf of ideas that matter. It requires comfort with ambiguity, a willingness to learn publicly, and the discipline to stay engaged through the messy middle. I have seen innovation falter not because leaders lacked vision, but because they moved on too quickly—assuming the announcement was the hardest part.
It wasn’t.
The hardest part is staying.
Innovation also demands learning—not performative assessment, but real reflection. What surprised us? What assumptions were wrong? What did this reveal about our systems and culture? Without that learning, innovation becomes motion without meaning.
From where I sit, higher education’s challenge is not a lack of commitment to innovation. It is that we often approach it in ways that make failure more likely—by prioritizing comfort over courage, consensus over clarity, and risk avoidance over responsible experimentation.
The question is not whether higher education needs innovation. It does.
The real question is whether we are willing to lead it differently—and whether we are willing to accept what that kind of leadership asks of us.
Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson is a distinguished leader in higher education with over 35 years of experience shaping innovation and fostering institutional excellence. Currently leading the launch of The American University of Greece Global Campus, she is also Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Bay Path University. During her tenure as Provost, she launched over 40 academic programs and secured over $6 million in grant funding. She is the author of several influential works, including IngenioUs Leadership: Creating Solutions to Wicked Problems in Higher Education.