Why “Do More with Less” Fails as a Driver of Innovation in Higher Education
In his influential work, The Discipline of Innovation, Peter Drucker delivers a clear and enduring message: innovation is not a matter of luck, sudden inspiration, or merely a character trait of those endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit. It is a structured, systematic process that is rooted in observation, analysis, and disciplined execution. Drucker identifies seven sources of innovation opportunities, ranging from industry and market changes to process needs, demographic shifts, and new knowledge. In the business world, these insights endure four decades later and remain profoundly practical, providing business leaders with a blueprint for building a practice of innovation in their organizations.
Yet, the higher education context presents a starkly different reality. Administrators and faculty are frequently told to “do more with less” or to adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset. These exhortations assume that innovation can flourish under constraint or be conjured from sheer effort like they do in the business world. The reality, however, is far less forgiving. Unlike mechanistic business tasks, much of higher education work, particularly research administration, is cognitively intensive, context-dependent, highly specialized and often invisible. It cannot be compressed, automated, or scaled without loss of quality, risk management, or institutional knowledge.
Among Drucker’s seven sources of innovation, two are arguably most relevant to research administration today: industry and market changes and process needs. Policy changes, or sudden funding constraints can theoretically catalyze new approaches. Similarly, inefficiencies in administrative processes can suggest opportunities for improvement. In principle, these should provide fertile ground for innovation. In practice, however, the workforce is overloaded. Staff lack the time, capacity, and structural support to convert these “opportunities” into meaningful change. What would be a manageable stimulus in a business environment becomes an added burden in an already stretched system.
Drucker’s observations can be highly instructional for scientists or faculty who have sufficient time and cognitive space to explore, experiment, and reflect. For them, the conditions of unexpected occurrences or new knowledge can spark creative ideas that eventually lead to real innovation. Research administration, by contrast, operates under constant operational pressure. Staff are focused on compliance, deadlines, and risk management, leaving little room to step back, analyze, or experiment. This also limits the ability to apply Drucker’s other principles, such as user-centric innovation and disciplined focus, which require time and margin to identify real problems and develop practical, straightforward solutions. In research administration, the very conditions that allow scientific innovation to thrive—time, reflection, and cognitive bandwidth—are precisely what are lacking.
The lesson is sobering: constraint alone does not produce innovation. Cognitive-intensive work does not thrive under the same conditions that may spur creativity in business settings. Simply urging staff to “be entrepreneurial” or to “do more with less” is insufficient and often counterproductive. Innovation of the kind Drucker describes requires deliberate investment—time, expertise, resources, and structural support—so teams can engage in sustained observation, analysis, and execution. Yet these conditions are rarely prioritized in academic research departments, where research administration roles are routinely boxed in as task-based and output-driven. Continuing to ignore these realities while proceeding with business-as-usual risks becoming a strategic failure, because the current approach to hiring, training, and retaining research administrators is already buckling under complexity and workload, making business as usual an increasingly untenable option.
Higher education leaders may view the current environment as an opportunity for innovation, but without confronting systemic capacity limits, such calls remain largely inactionable. Innovation is not a rhetorical stance or a moment of inspiration; it is disciplined work that demands focus, space, intentionality, resources.
If innovation through constraint is untenable and we conclude business-as-usual is not strong positioning for the future, then the risk is not stagnation but strategic drift. Without intentional redesign of research administration roles and capacity, institutions default to short-term coping rather than long-term adaptation. Over time, this will devolve into complete operational ineffectiveness and have major impacts on the institution’s ability to sustain a credible research enterprise at all.
For a more critical analysis of how “do more with less” framing affects burnout, trust, and institutional behavior in research environments, see Stop Saying “Do More with Less.”
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Additional reading:
The Discipline of Innovation, Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review, 1985
