Review a new tool designed to promote collaboration across IHE departments
Pursuing Strategic Innovation
Institutions of higher education (IHEs) today face a complex landscape marked by shifting demographics, fluctuating enrollment, evolving compliance mandates, shrinking federal funding, budgetary pressures, workforce reductions, and mounting deferred maintenance. To remain resilient and relevant, IHEs must pursue strategic innovation—exploring new opportunities that strengthen institutional sustainability and mission alignment.
Yet every meaningful innovation carries an element of uncertainty. The challenge for risk professionals lies not in avoiding risk altogether, but in ensuring that risk is understood, evaluated, and managed proactively.
As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, observed, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” Inaction, in effect, poses its own existential threat.
The Cost of Inaction
As Former US President John F. Kennedy famously said, “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.”
While innovation is indispensable to institutional resilience, so is disciplined risk management that includes risk identification, assessment, and mitigation prior to strategy adoption.
For risk managers, this underscores the need to embed thoughtful risk review into strategic decision-making processes from the outset—not as a roadblock, but as a value-added enabler of innovation.
Introducing the New Initiatives Checklist
To support this endeavor, consider adopting the New Initiatives Checklist—a structured, due-diligence tool designed to promote collaboration across departments and ensure that proposed initiatives receive appropriate risk review before implementation.
Consider a real-world example: A colleague once proposed contracting with a new service provider that required access to student data containing personally identifiable information (PII). The contract draft submitted to the provider included key provisions around indemnification, confidentiality, breach notification, and network security. When the provider hesitated to accept these terms, a quick online search revealed their involvement in a major data breach at another university. If the checklist process had been followed, the issue would have surfaced long before reaching the contract stage.
A Tool for Collaboration and Due Diligence
This New Initiatives Checklist—available in an editable Word format—can be tailored to reflect each institution’s governance and risk environment. Its structured prompts facilitate:
- Early identification of potential risks in new initiatives or partnerships.
- Cross-departmental collaboration that breaks down operational silos.
- Enhanced risk awareness and accountability across the organization.
- Proactive mitigation strategies that protect institutional integrity and reputation.
By incorporating the checklist into routine planning discussions, risk managers can transform their role from “gatekeeper” to strategic partner—helping their institutions innovate safely and sustainably.
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