ASU President Michael Crow outlined his plan for an “enterprise model” for the New American University at his annual conversation Tuesday at the Tempe Center for the Arts.
Crow’s goal is to eliminate the traditional university model, which is based upon exclusion, and has been transitioning to the “enterprise model” for the past 10 years.
He mentioned four necessities to his model including perpetual innovation, an edge of newness, deep competitiveness and ecologies of innovation.
“As a result we can produce fantastic people and ideas,” Crow said.
Students should be at the edge of newness so they have the ability to learn anything, he said.
“ASU should be highly innovated, take high risks and work on a large scale,” Crow said.
ASU is focusing energy and creativity into solving society’s biggest challenges. Crow wants to work to support economic, social, cultural and environmental well-being.
By defining agencies and bureaucracies, he said a simplistic approach would continue to fail because of the resistance to change.
Crow plans to improve the structure of ASU by moving towards a high functioning enterprise.
“We have a lot of things we want to achieve,” Crow said.
ASU President’s Club co-chair Gary Tooker said ASU has become a community leader and has already marked many milestones.
“We need to ask ourselves a question,” he said. “As community leaders, what do we see for the future?”
Crow plans to remodel ASU through a process of “creative destruction.”
One of the biggest problems ASU has is not innovating within our institutions, Crow said.
“We need to go back and look at everything and look through how things can be reoriented into new trajectories,” he said.
Crow said ASU has been “making some progress” in ensuring that graduates will be able to obtain jobs and be successful.
He wants to advise, link and train students to work in multiple areas to increase depths.
“Ninety-seven percent of ASU graduates are employed or are in graduate programs within a year,” he said.
Sally Moore, the director of the President’s Community Enrichment Programs, said the turnout at the conversation with Crow was higher than it has been for the past few years.
The audience filled nearly all of the 600 seats in the TCA Theater.
Reach the reporter at amhayne1@asu.edu
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