Reshaping Higher Educational Institutions through Frugal Open Innovation

Abstract

Many private higher educational institutions (PHEI) are facing poor profitability, increased short term debts with under-resourced cash flow and insufficient funds that could lead to financial distress. To address the issues of ever-changing business environments and to deliver value propositions, PHEIs should focus on their intangible assets to increase their capabilities to achieve frugal open innovation. The objective of this paper is to investigate the challenges faced by private universities from the practitioners’ points of view and offer a practical solution. This paper also attempts to identify whether there is a need for any changes in business model or operations required by private universities to sustain their competitive advantage in the current environment. This study is exploratory in nature due to scarcity of past literature on frugal open innovation in PHEI context. Interviews were conducted with experienced practitioners to elicit their experience managing challenges in PHEI. As a result, this paper sheds light on the ability of PHEIs to formalize, capture, and leverage its intangible assets rather than only investing and managing tangible assets in order to achieve frugal open innovation. Frugal open innovation is the enabler for PHEI to focus on core functions, create closer integration with industry, local and international communities and promote greater efficiency in operations. This paper is novel because it seeks to contribute to the current debate in the literature, positioning frugal open innovation (FOI) within the sphere of intellectual capital research, through exploring the effect of intellectual capital on frugal innovation is mediated through the information technology capability. The result indicates that sales and operating planning (S&OP) can be panacea for the five main challenges faced by PHEI includes structural challenges, operational challenges, financial challenges, social challenges and technological challenges. We conclude that there is a role for intellectual capital to achieve FOI by influencing IT capabilities, thus warrants more research to fill this research gap.

Adoption of Big Data Analytics and Its Impact on Organizational Performance in Higher Education Mediated by Knowledge Management

“…Regarding environmental factors, external support has a significant effect on BDA adoption, which was concluded in previous investigations [129] and is consistent with studies that indicate that open innovation requires external collaboration [87,[130][131][132], while competitive pressure has a negligible effect on BDA adoption, consistent with the…”

“…Regarding environmental factors, external support has a significant effect on BDA adoption, which was concluded in previous investigations [129] and is consistent with studies that indicate that open innovation requires external collaboration [87,[130][131][132], while competitive pressure has a negligible effect on BDA adoption, consistent with the results of other studies [33] but inconsistent with other results [31,133]. This may be due to the early stage of adoption in HEIs, which are using BDA as a process of learning and verifying its potential and not as a necessity triggered by competitive pressure.…”

Students’ Perceptions on the University Social Responsibilities of a Malaysian Private University: Does Gender Matter?

“…In Malaysia, private education sectors are generally profit-generated in nature. Hence, meeting with the profit is prominent in Malaysian private educational institutions (Jayabalan, Dorasamy & Raman, 2021), and the Malaysian private higher learning institutions face numerous challenges in terms of academics, facilities, students, programs and curriculum, competition, accreditation, finance and research (Anis, Islam & Abdullah, 2018). However, the lack of regulations and policies has raised the question of the significance and relevancy of the USR initiatives by the HEIs, whereby most USR initiatives in HEIs remain voluntary acts.…”

Systematic review of institutional innovation literature: towards a multi-level management model

“…These innovation contexts strengthen the contribution of intangible resources (e.g., proximity, relational capital, cooperation, and learning) as sources of economic growth. Constructs such as the quadruple helix (Schütz et al 2018), 2 posit on actors and systems for these contexts with institutions pursuing radical (Gao et al 2015;Martínez-Pérez et al 2019;Qing et al 2019;Ventura et al 2020), incremental (Vermeulen et al 2007b), and in some cases, frugal (Kunamaneni 2019;Ananthram and Chan 2021;Jayabalan et al 2021) innovations.…”