Designing an Agile Strategy Game for KSU-Olathe

By Ed Morrison | September 12, 2017

The Kansas State University Olathe campus presents an opportunity to design the future of the land-grant university within a metropolitan campus. To address these challenges, our colleagues at Kansas State engaged the Agile Strategy Lab to introduce Strategic Doing to faculty and staff from the Olathe campus.

In order to make this introduction, we designed a new version of Strategic Doing: The Game. In this version, we closely paralleled the challenges and opportunities facing the Olathe campus. We included these elements in the simulation:

The university-industry relationships

  • The university has renowned programs in agriculture, engineering, veterinary medicine, and aviation.
  • The region’s business and industry leaders are seeking greater engagement by higher education institutions in solving the region’s workforce development issues w/r/t quantity and applicable skills
  • The region is desperate for sources of innovation in areas such as information technologies, software development, etc.
  • The regions’ civic and business/industry leaders are looking for out-of-the-box thinking from the region’s higher education institutions (i.e. non-traditional academic solutions)
  • Business and industry want to engage the regional campus, but need to be assured that they can move at the speed of business and be responsive.
  • The days of corporate philanthropic giving are gone and business/industry needs to see Return on Investment for any strategic investments they make.
  • The regional campus has had limited engagement with the region’s small to medium businesses, preferring to date to serve the region’s few large corporations.
  • The university is seeking vision of what it means to be a land-grant institution engaged in an urban setting (i.e. Land Grant 2.0)
  • Regional engagement capacity is limited by faculty teaching/researching bandwidth
  • Per the state’s regent’s policy, the regional campus cannot directly compete against established programs offered through other regent universities within the region, nor is it realistic to compete against well-established programs.
  • Increasingly expected that all activities will contribute to a positive regional economic impact
  • Regional leaders are generally not deeply engaged in the region’s institutions of higher education
  • The region’s leaders are looking for solutions that lift the region as a whole, not just a particular geography or demographic.
  • The Flagship brand is strong in the region and its graduates are sought after as a result of both academic performance, work ethic, and civic engagement/leadership.
  • The business and industry community want to work with the regional campus and are looking for true partnerships in the areas of innovation, research and development, and talent development.
  • The regional campus is perceived as having made several starts, stops, and changes in directions in their programs and needs to solidify and sustain its value to the community and the region’s business and industry community.
  • Faculty are administratively attached to the flagship campus and matrixed to the regional campus
  • Like the flagship campus, the regional campus is experiencing diminishing state and institution resources
  • Analyzes have been run that indicate that the regional campus must be sustained by a combination of missions, not solely on traditional academic enrollment.
  • To offset the diminishing resources, it is required to increase private revenue generation

The broader regional engagement

  • The university is seeking vision of what it means to be a land-grant institution engaged in an urban setting (i.e. Land Grant 2.0)
  • Regional engagement capacity is limited by faculty teaching/researching bandwidth
  • Per the state’s regent’s policy, the regional campus cannot directly compete against established programs offered through other regent universities within the region, nor is it realistic to compete against well-established programs.
  • Increasingly expected that all activities will contribute to a positive regional economic impact
  • Regional leaders are generally not deeply engaged in the region’s institutions of higher education
  • The region’s leaders are looking for solutions that lift the region as a whole, not just a particular geography or demographic.
  • The Flagship brand is strong in the region and its graduates are sought after as a result of both academic performance, work ethic, and civic engagement/leadership.
  • The business and industry community want to work with the regional campus and are looking for true partnerships in the areas of innovation, research and development, and talent development.
  • The regional campus is perceived as having made several starts, stops, and changes in directions in their programs and needs to solidify and sustain its value to the community and the region’s business and industry community.

The flagship-regional campus interactions:

  • Faculty are administratively attached to the flagship campus and matrixed to the regional campus
  • Like the flagship campus, the regional campus is experiencing diminishing state and institution resources
  • Analyzes have been run that indicate that the regional campus must be sustained by a combination of missions, not solely on traditional academic enrollment.
  • To offset the diminishing resources, it is required to increase private revenue generation
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