The Aspen Institute has published a report on its July 2014 Roundtable on Institutional Innovation, in which ARL executive director Elliott Shore participated along with 22 other leaders in business and government. The report, Navigating Continual Disruption, captures the themes explored by the roundtable, starting with an explanation of the “Big Shift” identified by John Hagel and John Seely Brown of the Deloitte Center for the Edge as being largely spurred by dramatic changes in information and communications technologies. The report goes on to discuss the ways in which the Big Shift is playing out in various sectors—corporate, government, education, and nonprofit. A section on leading organizations through disruptive change concludes the report.
The Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education—founded in 2012 by CLIR and Vanderbilt University to analyze emerging national-scale digital projects and their potential to transform higher education in terms of scholarly productivity, teaching, cost efficiency, and sustainability—is featured in a sidebar on pages 30–34 of the Aspen Institute report. As the report’s author, Richard Adler, notes, “A fundamental assumption of the Committee [of which Elliott Shore is a member] is that one of the greatest opportunities offered by the new digital technology is for existing institutions to think collaboratively and imaginatively about how they can reinvent their operations. Its goal is to take advantage of current disruptions to build a new kind of coherent ecosystem in higher education.”
