Overview

Led by Dr. Angela Gunder (Opened Culture, University of Arizona), with co-authors Dr. Melissa Vito (UT San Antonio), Dr. Karen Vignare (Association of Public and Land-grant Universities), Dr. Cristi Ford (D2L), and Dr. Josh Herron (University of Arizona Global Campus), this experience paper challenges a narrow but persistent view of academic innovation. In much of higher education, innovation is conflated with technology adoption, confined to units that carry the word in their title, or treated as a luxury reserved for well-resourced organizations during stable times. The paper argues instead that academic innovation is cultural practice enacted across roles, disciplines, and institutional types, carried out by faculty, staff, students, and administrators who are often doing the work without recognition or abundant resources, and frequently in isolation.

The argument rests on three bodies of work. A cultural framework, grounded in a commissioned study for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, organizes academic innovation around collaboration, creation, and connection, locating sustainable innovation where agency, trust, and reflection intersect. Communities of practice theory frames the work as collective sensemaking among people who share a concern and learn through regular interaction. Design thinking supplies the method, adapted into time-bound design sprints in which cross-role teams move from problem definition through prototyping to commitment, on the premise that the people closest to a problem are well positioned to solve it regardless of title.

The paper traces the Academic Innovation Alliance (AIA) across a three-year developmental arc. A 2023 NASEM commission on STEM student success brought several of the authors into sustained inquiry and surfaced a question they could not answer: if innovation is cultural work requiring cross-sector participation, where was the community to support it? That question found an audience at APLU, which convened 22 institutions in Chicago in July 2024 and discovered innovation stalling in isolation across the network. In March 2025, the Ascent Summit at the University of Texas at San Antonio gathered roughly 25 leaders to name what academic innovation meant in their contexts, and in February 2026, Sprint Zero brought about 35 leaders together at UT San Antonio for a full-day design sprint, followed by a virtual series that extended the work to more than 160 participants. The AIA is convened by APLU, UT San Antonio, and Opened Culture, with D2L sponsorship since 2025.

Three findings emerged across the convenings. The first is that innovation identity extends well beyond titled roles: participants consistently resisted confining innovation to specific positions or to technology adoption, and many people doing the work do not see themselves as innovators, which makes vocabulary and framing decisive. The second is that structured design sprints accelerate shared practice. Sprint Zero’s four activities, co-defining academic innovation, surfacing failure and friction, prototyping cross-institutional sprints, and designing the alliance itself, moved a cross-sector group from shared language to shared commitment, with recurring friction themes including leadership turnover, data that does not persuade, and initiative fatigue. The third is that culture functions as the determining infrastructure for sustained innovation, a finding the community engaged candidly, including productive disagreement about how failure and scarcity should be understood.

For distance education, the paper offers grounded direction. Isolation persists as a barrier to innovation, and distance education professionals, who often work across departmental boundaries as translators between technology, pedagogy, and strategy, are among those most affected and best positioned to convene cross-institutional communities. The AIA model suggests that innovation framed as aspiration must be matched by support for innovation as daily practice, and that innovation under constraint depends on community rather than abundance, since individual practitioners cannot sustain the work alone. With their expertise in distributed facilitation and technology-mediated collaboration, distance education units are well suited to adapt the design sprint model and to invite participation across roles and sectors, including the many who do this work under other names. The AIA is offered as both a tested model and an open invitation to bring that work into community.