Duke University leads ‘incubator’ for growing universities worldwide

Duke University’s “incubator” for growing universities is officially underway. The Future Universities Alliance is a home for 49 startup universities, existing institutions piloting new initiatives and schools looking to share secrets to their own success across 23 countries for the next year. 

The inaugural cohort, dubbed the Innovation Sandbox, will convene in Durham in October and virtually through the rest of the year to share core issues they’re facing and receive feedback from fellow institutions.

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The alliance is a pivot from Duke’s past global initiatives, informed by the changing tides of higher education being felt across the globe.

The lineup

The alliance has three different pathways to participate, so not all universities are in the same stage of growth. Fifteen are startups that are still seeking or have recently obtained accreditation. The largest group, 27 universities, are more established institutions looking to implement significant changes in their operations.

Startups include Cambridge Spark in the United Kingdom, an AI and data workforce development provider transitioning toward a degree-granting institution, Africa Urban Lab in Tanzania, a training ground for urban leaders embedded in the African School of Economics, and inVision U in Kazakhstan, a university for founders, social innovators and future regional leaders.

Existing institutions pursuing new initiatives include Zamorano University in Honduras, which will focus on transforming its curriculum for future agri-food systems leadership and sustainability, Plaksha University in India, which plans to launch a biosystems engineering and translation initiative that bridges biology, quantitative engineering and and societally relevant applications, and James Cook University in Australia, which seeks to use data-informed curriculum to redesign programs, clarify student pathways and strengthen learning outcomes.

There’s also a number of U.S.-based institutions that may ring a bell. 

Georgetown University will focus on reinventing the liberal arts degree around applied learning, career preparedness, affordability, access and public purpose. Northeastern University will work toward building lifelong learning infrastructure for portable credentials, work-based learning and talent mobility. And UNC-Asheville is pursuing institutional renewal by implementing “Asheville 2030” and a fresh liberal arts agenda that combines interdisciplinary inquiry, durable skills, career readiness and future-facing learning.

The remaining seven are also established institutions, but ones that feel they have created something that is working for themselves and want to expand the model beyond their walls. CODE University of Applied Sciences in Germany and Ozyegin University in Turkey, for example, have developed more technology-heavy ways of delivering an education, Pickus said. 

CODE’s focus will be expanding its project-based learning model for other universities as an alternative to traditional university teaching structures, and Ozyegin will work toward becoming a documented “interdisciplinary innovation ecosystem.” Duke itself is focused on strategic thinking, teamwork, decision-making and active learning through simulation-based exercises.

The 49 participants will be organized into small groups consisting of institutions from the various pathways, with an added external facilitator, to engage in a peer learning model, said Duke’s Executive Director for Global Higher Education and Strategic Initiatives Scott Benson.

Duke and a global lens

Simply put, the alliance looks for institutions that are trying to advance programs and projects that are larger in scope than what the average university is doing. Beyond that, there’s an intentional lack of a standard for entry, Noah Pickus, founder of the Future Universities Alliance and head of global strategy and partnerships at Duke, told Carolina Public Press.

The hope is that different kinds of universities that likely wouldn’t cross paths otherwise — like the R1 institution University of Nebraska-Lincoln and liberal arts startup Musizi University in Uganda — can learn from each other and help one another flourish.

“Our hypothesis is that pluralism, that heterogeneity, is often what’s missing in higher education networks, that very often you have liberal arts colleges talking to liberal arts colleges, research universities to research universities, all of which is valuable,” Pickus said.

“But sometimes a new university can do something and present something that, because it’s just fresh, you can learn from even if you’re an established place. And similarly, if you’re a new university, you have a lot of questions about, how do we regularize this? How do we make it sustainable? What is a registrar’s office? What do we do? 

“In this moment of uncertainty about what are the best models for higher education, what we need is opportunities where you have heterogeneous institutions working on specific projects — not just exchanging memos or white papers — but actually working through things in real time, so that the innovators and the builders and the renewers feel less isolated, and that they can cross over.”

The uncertainty about the current and future role of higher education isn’t limited to the United States, and that understanding informs the alliance’s approach to its global partnerships. 

So far, Pickus has found that international universities face many of the same challenges as American universities, like meeting workforce needs and learning to coincide with artificial intelligence, but the contexts of those challenges can vary widely.

“You can see the ways in which, across the world, many universities are struggling with how to align better with the workforce,” Pickus said. “How do you prepare students today for the jobs that exist now and in the future?

“But that looks different when you are trying to do it in Academic City University in Ghana, where they have an exploding population across the continent, and they have very little access to higher education, than it does in South Korea, where you may have reduced demographic change, less population, but you have enormously high tech and creative industries all packed into a small place. In that sense, the problems are both workforce alignment, but the contexts are different.”

UNC-Asheville, for example, was the only University of North Carolina System school to see a decline in enrollment last year, which UNC System leaders attributed to Tropical Storm Helene. While that was a unique circumstance, UNCA is asking questions many others face, too.

“They’re trying to figure out what does liberal arts 2.0 look like and how do you get the skills right?” Pickus said. 

“How do you do interdisciplinary learning, and how do you connect with Asheville’s vision of its future? How do you integrate into that? Same problem, different context. I could give you six other schools that are trying to do the same thing. They’re just in different parts of the world. That’s the moment of encounter here.”

There’s been a surprising level of support and interest in the alliance from the US and around the world so far, Pickus said. With just six weeks to announce and garner applications to join the program, the alliance received more than 100 applications and took in double the number of institutions they planned to. In many cases, the countries’ governments directly supported and encouraged participation.

Still, we live in a time when people can feel the desire to pull inward, Pickus said. Americans think we should focus on our own issues here at home, or other countries want to work to support themselves without outside influence. 

But students and faculty across academia have been receptive to the notion that ideas can and do come from everywhere. From the application process alone, it became clear that U.S. universities in particular are hungry for connection with other institutions, stateside and beyond.

“If Taejae University in South Korea has figured out a better way to use AI to improve education and workforce alignment, why wouldn’t you want NC State or Duke to know about that?” Pickus said. “I think, in that sense, that openness, particularly to a younger generation, is very natural.”

The role for Duke

The alliance wouldn’t exist without the support of Duke, and it is part of Duke’s global strategy as a university, Pickus said. But it also intentionally avoids Duke branding, because ultimately the university is there to learn a few things, too.

“The distinction we make is it’s not the Duke alliance where everyone should be like Duke,” Pickus said.

“If this is something that is genuinely going to be an open source opportunity to learn, it’s an opportunity for places like Duke and Georgetown to learn as much as it is for new startups in Kazakhstan to learn. We are explicitly inviting the participants from all kinds of institutions, as we’ve talked, into a relationship in which they’re helping to co-create what comes out of this.”

Duke already has the reputation of having strong international partnerships, largely due to its collaborations with institutions in China and Singapore and its Global Health Institute across sub-Saharan Africa. 

The university learned valuable lessons creating Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, and Duke Kunshan University in China has had a lot of success, Pickus said. 

But since those partnerships, Duke’s global strategy has been evolving, but not moving away, from joint ventures like them. This alliance marks a new era of international collaboration.

“(We are moving toward) the possibility, in the alliance’s case, that Duke can be a force multiplier for innovation and renewal in higher education by providing the support and incubation for this kind of platform,” Pickus said. 

“In that sense, you don’t set up a joint arrangement in 23 countries, which wouldn’t be possible or even necessarily desirable. You set it up in such a way that the work that’s already going on can be supported, so it’s much more reciprocal. It’s a lighter footprint, but we hope for a bigger impact.”

The alliance is a startup trying to support other startups — albeit within the context of a 100-year-old university, Benson said. That means aspects of the program may change over time, but the mission will remain.

“This is a learning year. We are continuing as a new initiative within Duke to use this opportunity to both support this network, but also use it to inform the direction that we go in the future,” he said.

“The core hypothesis will remain: we believe deeply in bringing together both startup universities and established universities together in community. How that continues to unfold year over year after we implement this Innovation Sandbox I think remains to be seen, and we want to be adaptive to and responsive to the community that we’re creating.”

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