Exploring Conceptual and Practical Implications of This Work

Abstract

This chapter comprises two parts. The first part is addressed to higher education scholars and graduate students. It explores conceptual insights that emerge from this work. Drawing on key principles from complex adaptive systems theory such as disrupting units’ autopoietic processes (tendency to seek homoeostasis) and notions of connectivity, interdependence and co-evolution between academic units and their environments, it explores how these concepts can be employed to enhance academic units’ adaptive capacities and overcome units’ resistance to change. The second part of Chapter 9 is addressed to practitioners; written in clear (non-theoretical language), it discusses five strategies that academic units can implement to enhance academic units’ capacities to adapt to the challenges posed by complex, turbulent environments and to develop units’ fiscal self- reliance. Each strategy is defined, its significance explained and suggestions on how it can be attained are provided; the five strategies are (1) transforming academic units’ culture and values, (2) implementing distributed leadership and decision making, (3) undertaking strategic positioning and strategic thinking for differentiation in core markets, (4) enhancing flexibility and risk taking to develop units’ capacities for innovation and (5) developing units’ entrepreneurial capacities and using entrepreneurial activities to attain fiscal self-reliance.