Driving Innovation in Higher Ed Through Data
Maryville University is working to put data at the heart of the student experience — not just for the traditional four-year degree pathway, but to inspire a lifelong-learning journey.
It's one thing to talk about innovation, but another thing to actually make it happen. Driving actual change is all about timing — having the right idea at the right moment, according to Phil Komarny, chief innovation officer at an institution known for innovation: Maryville University. And that moment is now: Phil sees COVID as a catalyst for utilizing data to revolutionize higher education and the student experience. Here, we talk about the potential of verifiable credentials, why graduation should not be the end of a student's learning journey, helping students make the most of their own data, and more. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Campus Technology: What does it mean to be a chief innovation officer in higher ed?
Phil Komarny: Innovation inside of the higher ed vertical is looked at in many different ways. A lot of people love to talk about innovation, but a lot of people don't do it. Maryville is all about action, or thinking about how innovation can take our university to that next level. So my job is helping our teams understand how to implement technology in more of a collective fashion, so we can all be a part of that change.
I'm really inspired by the university, by the president and the team there. So much so I left a really great job — I loved the work I was doing at Salesforce as their vice president of innovation. I really saw innovation happening at Maryville, and I really wanted to be involved in some actual change. Maryville sees innovation as change, not as theater. So they want to see things actually happen — not just talk about all this innovation and all this work we may or may not be doing, but really put something into the world that can reach a lot more people.
One of the things I've learned is innovation is all about timing. It's not about having the greatest idea at the greatest time. There are no "new ideas" in this space. You're really trying to get the right idea to happen at the right moment.
CT: How is your experience in the technology industry, and at Salesforce in particular, going to inform your work at Maryville?
Komarny: I'm a lifelong learner: I've learned through every one of my positions since I started my little career way back in the day. I've had the privilege of working at pretty high levels inside of education — chief digital officer at the University of Texas — and then also outside of education, for example at Robots and Pencils, a service firm that supports a lot of educational facilities with mobile application development and tech stacks that really speak to user experience. Taking all the things that I've learned and done, I see Maryville as almost a culmination of everything that I was able to attain — a place that really wants to see innovation be driven.
I think because of what we went through with COVID — to me, COVID stands for catalyst of verifiable individual data — we're starting to see how companies like Salesforce are pushing data out to the edge, and utilizing verifiable credentials and verifiable data to build new systems that engage a customer or a learner. Timing is everything, and right now is a perfect time to start to show those solutions. We've been early in the past around blockchains and things like verifiable credentials and self-sovereign identity. The conversation has matured, the tech has matured, and a catalyst happened around COVID — where we had to be remote, we spent two years on these Zoom meetings, never being in front of each other, but really trusting each other. We've learned a lot in the last two years about digital, and how this can be done at a distance and can still be a great experience. And I think we can build some validation mechanisms inside of that experience, to make it even better, to make it even more trusted, to make people understand their data even more. So universities have a great opportunity here in the next two to five years to really help everybody understand how data has controlled us, and how data can power our futures.