EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association that helps higher education elevate the impact of IT. It supports those who lead, manage, deploy, and use information technology to advance higher education. EDUCAUSE hosts an annual meeting every fall, bringing together people from over 23,000 member organizations. The 2019 EDUCAUSE conference took place from October 14 – 17 in Chicago. Starting in 2018, EDUCAUSE added a new set of activities to the conference, designed to bring together groups of people who were interested in a common topic, and aimed at facilitating open conversations and exchange ideas, experiences and strategy. These meetings, called Brain-Dates, are initiated by EDUCAUSE members.
On October 16, 2019, Dr. Carlos Solís, Texas State’s Associate VP for Technology Innovation, hosted a Brain-Date under the general call “Launching and Growing An Innovation Office”. He was joined in the discussion by Joshua Gaul, Director of Educational and Emerging Technologies at Empire State College SUNY, Leslie Warren, Dean, Library and Instructional Support at Northern Michigan University, and Melinda Duke, Chief Technology Officer at RMIT University, Australia. Participants discussed the varied definitions under which they see innovation programs operating at their institutions as well as the goals set forth for those programs. Goals ranged from developing new ways to increase the number of student applicants, to the creation of unique identifiers that would distinguish institutional programs from their competitors, to the development of focused efforts to develop a culture of innovation with IT groups and at the institutional level.
Participants were particularly interested in TIO’s efforts on AI driven accessibility services, and the piloting of structured workshops aimed at building creative capacity and ideation, including our recent launch of IdeaNote as a crowdsourcing tool for ideas, and idea management.
Dr. Carlos Solís is Associate Vice President for the Technology Innovation Office.
