A recent scoping review examining 13 studies of teaching innovations confirms this pattern: while institutions excel at launching initiatives, they frequently struggle to sustain them once the initial excitement fades (Bearman et al., 2024). The authors even note a cruel paradox: true sustainability means an innovation eventually ceases to be “innovative” and simply becomes “practice”, which is a transition few initiatives survive.

The challenge isn’t about creating innovation, it’s about sustaining it in an increasingly complex environment.

The standard explanation often blames faculty resistance or lack of funds. However, fresh evidence suggests the problem is structural: our institutions have become fragmented in ways that make collective change extraordinarily difficult.

The Fragmentation Challenge

We often view higher education as a cohesive community, but the reality of the modern institution is far more segmented. Stensaker (2018) describes the sector as characterized by “increased professionalization and specialisation.” Where teaching was once the sole domain of academic staff and students, it now intersects with admission specialists, learning designers, quality assurance officers, marketing teams and data analysts—each operating with distinct professional norms and priorities.

This fragmentation creates what Stensaker calls a need for “cultural work”: deliberate efforts to build understanding across these different groups. When a department wants to redesign assessment, for example, the conversation involves:

  • Academic staff concerned about standards, workload and professional identity.
  • Students expecting value, clear criteria and relevance to the labour market.
  • Quality assurance teams needing documentation for accreditation.
  • Educational developers advocating for evidence-based practice.
  • Management seeking alignment with strategic KPIs.

Innovation fails to scale not because the idea is bad, but because it cannot navigate this web of competing professional logic without active mediation.

Why “Good Ideas” Don’t Just Spread

For decades, we have relied on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (innovators, early adopters, laggards) to explain change. We assume that if an educational practice is “good,” it will spread like a consumer product.

However, Lyytinen and Damsgaard (2001) critique this model, arguing it misses the complexity of networked environments. Educational innovations are not static products like smartphones; they are “socially constructed and learning intensive.” Their success depends entirely on local relationships and institutional regimes. This helps explain why “good practice” imports so often disappoint: what works brilliantly at one institution is often rooted in that specific context’s invisible web of relationships and trust, which cannot be exported.

The Hidden Cost of “Coping”

If the system is fragmented, what does that mean for the innovators themselves? Research on Dutch higher education paints an interesting picture. Schophuizen and Kalz (2020) found that project leaders spend much of their energy on “contextual coping”: working around organisational barriers rather than with organisational support.

These innovators succeed locally by finding loopholes or using personal capital to secure resources. However, this coping mechanism is inherently unscalable. The study concluded that while bottom-up initiatives create awareness, they inevitably hit a ceiling without “synchronized and timely top-down action.” When innovation relies on individuals outsmarting their own institution’s bureaucracy, sustainability is impossible.

The Missing Role: The Translator

So, how do we bridge the gap between fragmented silos and coping individuals? The evidence points to the necessity of human bridges.

McGrath (2020) suggests that academic developers and change agents are essentially translators. They stand between different worlds. They help turn the abstract goals of university strategy into something meaningful for a lecturer in a classroom, and they translate the messy reality of student needs into something decision-makers can understand.

This is supported by Bearman et al. (2024), who found that “collaborative educational teams” are consistently the strongest enablers of sustainability. Schophuizen and Kalz (2020) add a critical nuance: in the absence of these formal roles, innovators are forced to rely on “informal networks“ to survive: a fragile and exhausting substitute for genuine structural support.

This moves beyond any administration; it is the strategic work of connection. It involves:

  1. Translation: Helping different ‘tribes’ (administrators, teachers, tech staff) understand each other’s language and concerns.
  2. Weaving: Connecting isolated experiments so they become a shared practice rather than a lonely struggle.
  3. Making Meaning: Creating spaces where colleagues can actually talk to each other and negotiate what a change means for them personally.

Scaling is about Learning, Not Just Rolling Out

Finally, we need to rethink what “scale” actually looks like. Marshall (2010) observed that while universities are full of bright ideas in individual classrooms, they often lack the underlying habits and support structures to let those ideas spread.

For innovation to stick, we need to stop treating it as a technical problem, such a software update to be installed. Instead, it is a deeply human challenge that requires:

  • Recognising reality: Acknowledging that our institutions are messy and disconnected, and designing our projects to survive that messiness.
  • Valuing the ‘glue’: Recognising that the time spent having coffee with colleagues, building trust and listening is the real work of change, not just “overhead.”
  • Supporting the connectors: Giving real recognition to the people who sit between faculties and services, helping us all pull in the same direction.

The question isn’t whether our innovations are good enough. It’s whether we have built the relationships to sustain them.

References

Bearman, M., Chandir, H., Mahoney, P., & Partridge, H. (2024). Sustaining teaching and learning innovations: A scoping review. Higher Education Research & Development, 43(4), 682–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2024.2364096

Lyytinen, K., & Damsgaard, J. (2001). What’s wrong with the diffusion of innovation theory? In Diffusing software product and process innovations (pp. 173–190). Springer.

Marshall, S. (2010). Change, technology and higher education: Are universities capable of organisational change? ALT-J, 18(3), 179–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687769.2010.529107

McGrath, C. (2020). Academic developers as brokers of change: Insights from a research project on change practice and agency. International Journal for Academic Development, 25(2), 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2019.1665524

Schophuizen, M., & Kalz, M. (2020). Educational innovation projects in Dutch higher education: Bottom-up contextual coping to deal with organizational challenges. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 17(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00197-z

Stensaker, B. (2018). Academic development as cultural work: Responding to the organizational complexity of modern higher education institutions. International Journal for Academic Development, 23(4), 274–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2017.1366322