Strategic Transformation through Collaborative Innovation: Fostering Dynamic Capabilities at a Regional College Campus
This Dissertation-in-Practice (DiP) explores the transformative potential of collaborative innovation at Lakeside College’s Peninsula Campus, a rural-serving regional college campus in Ontario, Canada. Employing constructivist and systems thinking, this DiP examines the barriers to innovation and strategic adaptation at the Peninsula Campus. The findings highlight the challenges of systemic underfunding, bureaucratic inertia, underdeveloped dynamic innovation capabilities, and the critical role of leadership in dismantling these barriers. Analysis reveals that a culture valuing cocreation, open communication, shared leadership, and a strong ethical foundation that explicitly commits to community engagement enhances innovation. By enhancing dynamic capabilities, the campus can better sense emergent trends, seize on insights and intelligence, and transform opportunities into sustainable outcomes. This DiP integrates transformational, relational, complexity, and distributed leadership theories to propose a regional campus collaborative innovation model to transform the campus and bolster its role in regional socioeconomic development. The DiP details the implementation of the RCCIM change initiative, emphasizing a structured yet adaptable communication strategy to foster widespread buy-in and an inclusive monitoring and evaluation plan designed to track progress, assess impact, and iteratively refine approaches based on feedback. This DiP contributes to understanding strategic change at regional campuses within multicampus institutions, underscoring the need for leadership alignment with campus dynamics. I advocate for a distributed, participatory leadership model, emphasizing continuous learning, agility, and collaborative innovation for sustainable growth and community impact.
collaborative innovation, dynamic capabilities, multicampus institution, socioeconomic development, strategic transformation, systems thinking
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