Opening Session: Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation Group, JISC

Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation at JISC, opened the JISC Innovation Forum 2008 by welcoming delegates to Keele University.

She talked about how JISC development activities have started to be called innovation and acknowledged questions such as “Is this just lip service?” “What do we mean by innovation?”

Innovation isn’t just about change but about creating something new, according to Wikipedia’s definition. “This captures what JISC is trying to do” said Sarah.

Who is here?

A varied range of academic staff are present at the Forum - from library managers to researchers and technical developers. There are 50 different job titles amongst the 300 delegates and over 100 different organisations are represented.

Sarah would like delegates at the forum to acknowledge that we are all part of “an innovation community”. She hopes delegates will share knowledge and practice and, importantly, share ideas. Building links and making connections is also what the Forum is about.

JISC is trying to use technology for change and to support institutions. JISC works across organisations.

Why do we need innovation in education?

Sarah outlined some of the reasons innovation is important:

How does JISC support innovation in education?

Through JISC services and programmes, JISC are trying to promote shared knowledge, help institutions develop innovative strategies and policies, and also collaborate with international communities to make links.

Ongoing JISC programmes and network examples include:

Many services and commercial companies have come out of this work.

More recent work includes:

Challenges for the future

Closing

“Go forth, share, discuss, innovate and enjoy!” said Sarah.

Q and A

Mark Johnson-University of Bolton

What about evaluation?

Sarah: One of the challenges is impact evaluation – we need methods to capture unexpected outcomes too and JISC are looking into ways to do this.

Some feedback on the session:

- Richard McKenna, JISC Director of Programme Management and Operations

July 15, 2008 | Filed Under jif08 | Author Sarah Wrays 

Comments

One Response to “Opening Session: Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation Group, JISC”

  1. Ross Gardler on July 15th, 2008 11:36 am

    “Open source vs. sustainable business models – how can we continue to fund development?”

    Why “vs.”?

    Open Source provides many viable business models. There are a large number of highly successful businesses who build, support and maintain open source software. similarly there are a very large number of businesses who are open source and contribute to its sustainability.

    Two quick examples which are relevant to our sector:

    XenSource (developed at the University of Cambridge) was sold for $500 million to Citrix - see http://www.xensource.com/PressReleases/Pages/pr081507.aspx

    The Apache web server serves the vast majority of web pages from UK institutions (and the world in general). The Apache Software Foundation, which maintains this software, along with a large number of less widely used outputs, for an annual spend of less than $168,000 in the last fiscal year. See http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch/2008/06/03/just-how-big-is-the-apache-software-foundation/

    Having said that, I agree we need to work at creating and sharing resources whilst at the same time building sustainable models.

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