Innovation infrastructure?

Readers may wonder why I've used the phrase "innovation infrastructure" in this blog's tag line.  There are two reasons:

1. In its report, Innovate America, the National Innovation Initiative (NII) calls for an "innovation infrastructure" as the foundation for the nation’s future productivity and competitiveness. The report notes: "Innovation generates the productivity that economists estimate has accounted for half of U.S. GDP growth over the past 50 years. ... It’s not only about offering new products and services, but also improving them and making them more affordable." Though the NII did not ignore nonprofit organizations and even targeted the nonprofit health-care industry, the report is curiously silent on any need for innovation and its byproduct, productivity, in higher education.
2. Higher education has a long history of innovation in instruction, but it would be difficult to find more than a few examples that increased instructional productivity by simultaneously improving learning accountability (improved outcomes) and expense accountability (reduced instructional expenses).  Indeed, most innovations that have improved learning accountability have done so at additional expense, and have proven unsustainable once grants or other forms of innovation funding lapsed.  The time is therefore right for higher education to develop an innovation infrastructure characterized by a foundation of a) systemic data analysis based on simple data mining applications or more sophisticated "business intelligence" platforms, b) related real-time reporting capabilities, and c) planning and governance processes established to use these and other IT resources to improve strategic performance.  Such an innovation infrastructure can support the ongoing, systemic identification of performance issues and/or opportunities and position the institution to act on each -- initiative by initiative.