Anne Carlisle, vice-chancellor at Falmouth University: ‘vice-chancellors are like animals grazing peacefully on a prairie, oblivious to the lions circling us’
Universities need to stop ‘educating in swim lanes’ and wake up to the entrepreneurial talent under their noses, says Anne Carlisle, vice-chancellor and chief executive of Falmouth University. In our regular series of conversations in which university leaders share their insights on innovation in HE with Nic Newman, Anne also shares why she is optimistic about innovation in UK HE, offers advice to founders and reveals why diversification is key for UK HE.
Every quarter Emerge, and Mary Curnock Cook brings together the Emerge network of university leaders to share insights and experiences on a burning issue within the sector — most recently the shift to digital assessment — and meet up-and-coming tech companies tackling that issue. Mixing these forward-thinking HE leaders with founders of fast-growing tech companies solving their problems, leads to a vibrant exchange of ideas, vigorous debate and an unprecedented level of future insight.
Nic: What type of future do you see for your university student offer, and how do you see the student experience changing?
Diversification is key. It makes absolute sense both in terms of market adaptation and extending the student experience. We’ve been diversifying our products and delivery at Falmouth for some time. We recognise that the orthodoxy of full-time undergraduate/postgraduate programmes delivered on campus is now just one part of what the marketplace wants.
It’s increasingly important that the offer can adapt to individual lives and needs. Take Falmouth Flexible, which we developed pre-pandemic as an online postgraduate programme to provide flexible learning in a range of creative subjects. Aimed at professionals, it has attracted students from all over the world, but its flexibility also meets the needs of those who live just a few miles from our campuses. Collectively, these cohorts form a global online creative community who, as restrictions permit, also coalesce around events relevant to the subject they’re studying, such as an international photography festival.
In my view, the demand for personalised learning will continue to grow. This is not just in terms of how students access learning, but also the design approach, use of technology, user experience, ability to build larger credentials from microcredentials, ‘anytime’ learning and much more.
Nic: How open is UK higher education to innovation? And what do you think is holding it back?
In one sense, UK HE has a strong appetite for innovation because the UK is an innovative nation. Nonetheless, it is the case that while most UK institutions have historically put significant levels of investment into capital and traditional modes of delivery, some didn’t invest as much in the alternatives — digital/online/hybrid learning. When the pandemic suddenly interrupted university life and face-to-face teaching, for some it was a case of rapidly accelerating what they were already doing in the digital space, and these universities experienced the benefits of the earlier investments they’d made. They were able to move more quickly as they’d already acquired technology design teams with the necessary digital skills to rapidly accelerate first remote and then hybrid-learning modes.
Covid was a totally unplanned experiment, which suddenly and uniformly affected us all. In my view, the more you treated it as an unfolding experiment the better. The pandemic not only called for excellent crisis management but, much more significantly, it required significant pedagogical innovation. It soon became clear that this was not just a technological issue. Nor was it an issue of translating existing analogue content onto digital platforms. Instead, it was fundamentally a design thinking and a communication challenge, where we had to learn, create and design new digital languages. This meant that we all found ourselves at the point where innovation often starts, with a Grand Challenge. Possibly one of the Grandest Challenges the education sector has ever faced.
Of course, we are now in a period of evaluation where we are analysing the data and deconstructing the findings from this experiment. Our task now is to understand what really worked and how did the most important person — the student user — experience it?
So, I’m optimistic about innovation in UK HE, especially when faced with threats and challenges. However, the last two years left another less positive legacy — it cost all of us a lot of money. In the future, depending on the economic climate for HE, it may be harder for universities to maintain current levels of investment to keep up the innovation momentum. But, for Falmouth, digital learning and diversification were already baked into the heart of our 2030 strategy, going back to 2017. We seriously invested in our digital infrastructure well before Covid disrupted our and everyone’s well-laid plans. This allowed us to accelerate what we were doing. So, for us, 2030 just came very early.
Nic: Why aren’t universities harnessing more technology and innovation?
Because universities are institutions with lots of history and traditions and are often heavily invested in particular models. For instance, most universities deliver knowledge through discrete subject disciplines and curriculum boundaries, even though industry and employers often argue that today’s graduates need to acquire the skills of complex problem solvers and work in transdisciplinary teams.
Sometimes, universities seem to be adrift from what’s happening around them, in terms of both opportunity and risk. For example, I was at a dinner event with many UK HE leaders just three years ago when Google delivered a short presentation about their personalised digital learning developments. Of course, they were keen to show off the new personalised learning platforms they were developing, but they were also eager to point out the potential size of this future global market. They suggested this would lead to significant disruption of existing education markets and the advantages they start with in terms of access to and analysis of user data, something they noted most universities have less capability to gather and, more importantly, to use and adapt. I felt they identified a genuine and impending paradigm shift, but I soon realised mine was a minority view. But then, that was pre-pandemic!
I sometimes use an analogy to describe the HE landscape, in which I picture UK HE as a prairie, which has lots of different-sized animals. Of course, all prairies develop their own ecosystems and, to survive, prairie animals do one of two things: i) they either eat each other, or ii) they adapt to co-exist. I think most of the animals (big and small) on the UK HE prairie have learnt to co-exist. They are amicably grazing side by side. However, this peaceful co-existence and internal focus reveal that a new breed of lions is circling on the edge and we could be about to be eaten!
In one sense, the Google presentation was probably designed as a provocation and the rejection was perhaps territorial. But back then, I think the message was ‘we want to collaborate, not kill you’. However, it seemed the response was more no than yes… presumably because we believe we are the kings of the jungle.
Nic: How do universities need to respond to these challenges?
Universities are sometimes guilty of offering things that neither reflect industry need nor meet consumer demand. I’m not sure quite why. It’s not like industry and employers aren’t shouting loudly enough. I work a lot with industry partners, and they are certainly not slow to state what they want. I find they less and less want people educated in subject ‘swim lanes’. Nonetheless, ‘swim lanes’ remains the predominant structure through which most people are educated in the UK.
To be clear, this is not about losing deep skills or specialisms. It’s about recognising that skills are becoming more important than knowledge. It was these findings that informed the development of our 2030 strategy and its revised curriculum approach. It’s why we say future-proofed graduates need to be complex problem solvers able to work in transdisciplinary teams.
We also believe the ‘stickiest’ learning is when students are ‘doing it for real’. When they’re responding to a real need, to a real-world challenge, to a marketplace opportunity. In my view, students learn quickest through real problem solving, preferably in teams, where they learn the value of working with different and diverse people. Education sometimes postpones important things to the end or leaves it too late. For instance, I think most students are naturally entrepreneurial if you let them. We need to liberate them to use that skill right from the start. At Falmouth, we offer courses focused on developing entrepreneurs through, for instance, our Launchpad programme.
Nic: You’re soon to leave Falmouth and you’ve said that Launchpad is one of the things you’re proudest of achieving in your time there. What is it and why?
In Launchpad the learning vehicle is setting up a high-growth tech company in which the students become the founding directors, thereby not only creating their own jobs, but also jobs for others. It is an innovative method of graduate incubation underpinned by a specially designed one-year MSc in Entrepreneurship, where setting up a new high growth business becomes the learning vehicle. This means students both build a new business and gain a master’s degree at the same time.
I set up my first company when I was a student with little support from my first university and so I regard the greatest asset a university has is the untapped raw talent of the student. I often think of students as uncut diamonds. However, some of our traditional teaching environments just aren’t designed to unlock and nurture that entrepreneurial talent. Therefore, I think it makes common sense to have an incubator and innovation culture at the heart of a university. I came to Falmouth with the objective of setting up Launchpad and in many respects, it now exemplifies the Falmouth approach.
Launchpad works because it brings innovation into the heart of HE. It demonstrates that universities are uniquely designed to both nurture talent in a hothouse environment and to act as an anchor institution and key driver in the development of a regional socio-economic eco-system.
Instead of an entrepreneur developing their individual idea and then seeking investment from the market, Launchpad first starts by identifying the market gap with the help of industry partners.
Launchpad is highly attractive to industry partners, who come from across the globe to participate, as it gives them rare access to a talent pool who can solve problems. Many of these partners come from other high-growth sectors such as aerospace, e-health, fintech, immersive/interactive media and include the likes of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Twitch, Amazon Web Services, Greenman Gaming, NHS and HSBC.
We then recruit graduate talent into small teams to address these industry challenges. Over the following months, we then ensure these teams keep pivoting to the market and through this process we build and launch a brand-new business, of which the students become the founding directors.
Once a Launchpad company is incorporated, we support them through the acceleration phase when they take their first investment and employ their first staff. Launchpad is a magnet for investors as it allows them to gain early access to emerging tech startups. It also brings new inward investment into the region and demonstrates that it is possible to bring major investment to the edge of Britain if the offer is right.
The final stage in the ecosystem is that post incorporation we help place the companies across the region; at which point the Launchpad innovation ecosystem begins over again with a new group of students.
To date we have incorporated 38 companies, all headquartered in Cornwall, one of the most economically deprived regions in the UK. This is a region that desperately needs more new companies in high-growth sectors. However, the Launchpad methodology could be applied to any part of the globe wanting to drive economic growth in their region, if there is a university with a pipeline of graduate talent.
We are currently planning to extend this approach across the university in a massively scaled-up initiative called Launchpad+, which we are developing in partnership with our local authority. This means high-growth company incubation and acceleration will become our new normal at Falmouth.
Nic: Good team building is critical for Launchpad. What advice would you give to founders who want to build better teams?
The most successful teams are diverse teams. Not only in terms of what they bring to the table, but also in terms of longevity, because they don’t tend to breed themselves out of existence by just reinforcing their own set of beliefs and thoughts. But with that comes a challenge in terms of managing difference, because equity is about recognising difference and people need to learn how to accept and use difference and not see it as a negative.
In Launchpad, a lot of the work we do is about how do you build an equitable and diverse team? How do you get good challenge as opposed to bad conflict? It’s an interesting question for somebody coming from Northern Ireland where everything around race, religion and diversity is writ very large. The challenge is to create a safe way in which those conversations can be opened up as opposed to avoiding them.
Talking is absolutely central to this. I’ve learned how to use open innovation methodologies, which are a very respected way to look at problem solving to bring diverse people together and to get them to really share their values and have fun, which is incredibly important as well, because that tends to bind people together. These methodologies do work.
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If you are a university leader and you are interested in sector innovation, please do connect with me, Nic Newman.
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