Build Back Boundaryless

Welcome to Boundaryless, a blog from Venn Collaboratie and Jim Woodell. Here, we plan to illuminate ideas that can help higher education institutions and their partners in government, nonprofits, and business explore the intersections of the talent-innovation-place Venn diagram and achieve higher levels of economic and community impact. Please let us know what you think by clicking on the reply icon at the bottom of the post.

Listen to our discussion on this topic! Jim Woodell hosted a live audio discussion exploring this topic on Friday, December 10, via Twitter Spaces. You can listen to a recording of the conversation here.

by Jim Woodell
December 1, 2021

Title image by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

Spanning Economic and Community Development
The Venn diagram of talent, innovation, and place—from which Venn Collaborative draws its name—suggests that there are three spheres we need to operate in to build local, regional and national economies and to create prosperity for all:

• Talent and workforce development—everything related to how, where, and what people learn and how they apply what they learn in work and life. 

• Innovation and entrepreneurship—creating new ideas, processes, products, and services then translating those ideas into economic and social impact. 

• Place—the domain of social, cultural, and quality of life issues. 

When looking at these spheres as a Venn diagram, we are challenged to think not only about how each of the three is an important part of economic and community development, but also how the intersections among the three can help us achieve a higher scale of impact. (The graphic is from Higher Education Engagement in Economic Development: Foundations for Strategy and Practice from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the University Economic Development Association) 

Why Boundaryless is Better
The challenge is that we love boundaries. They make it clear who has which pieces of the puzzle, whose job each action step is, and which organizations and individuals can be held accountable for results. When we separate things out in this way, we benefit from a system in which people develop expertise and can get deep work done. Boundaries help to create focus and allow us to concentrate efforts where we need to.

But where our communities and the economy are concerned, we need to reach beyond boundaries as often as we can. We must look for opportunities to connect ideas, resources, and plans across talent, innovation, and place to bring the circles together and find the overlaps. This means that higher education institutions need to find more ways to blend their missions of learning, discovery, and engagement. It means that local government, nonprofits, and businesses need to think beyond the immediate needs of their own institution, organization, or even their constituencies and consider how a broader view and a potentially longer timeline will reap more impact.

As an example, we tend not to think of the realm of scientific research that happens at large universities as being all that connected to the kinds of technical and applied education that happens at community colleges. But where do the technologies come from that create new skill demands and that require new technical and applied education offerings? From scientific research. One can imagine, then, that when science and innovation are connected to talent and workforce development, we might find opportunities for increasing the impact of new technologies on the economy and society.

In future blogs, we'll highlight examples of places, organizations, and individuals that are connecting across boundaries and accelerating impact. If you know examples of where this is happening, please send me an email with information about whom I might reach out to and learn more.

"Boundaryless" is more a mindset than it is a state of being for inter-organizational and inter-sectoral collaboration. Boundaries play an important role, as suggested above. Boundaries help us to undertake the myriad transactions that must take place for effective economic and community development. But when we shift toward a boundaryless mindset, we begin to find opportunities to build strong connections and relationships, building on but moving beyond transactions alone. This makes our communities and economies stronger.

To build back better may be to #buildbackboundaryless.