Community-Powered Innovation: Turning Shared Knowledge into Efficiency

I’m excited to share my recently published book chapter from Metrics, Mapping, and Modelling For Masterful Management In Higher Education (Emerald Press, 2025) Entitled Empower Innovation and Efficiency Through Community Sharing.

Chapter 25 explores how institutions can amplify innovation and efficiency by sharing knowledge as a community rather than reinventing the wheel in isolation. It introduces the Sentient Knowledge Map (SKM) as a “knodule”—a semantically rich, expert-curated knowledge module where information isn’t just linked, but connected with context: why relationships exist, what they mean, and how they’re classified through built-in schemas and metadata. The chapter then walks through the SKM’s community-shared libraries and how they’re organized—thousands of contributed metrics, surveys, best-practice models, assessments, rubrics, policies, procedures, processes, and curated resources drawn from other institutions and the broader research and web ecosystem. Readers also learn how stakeholder groups (internal and external) are defined within the model, what Perspective Analyses (PAs) and Practice Models (PMs) are used for inside the SKM, and how rubrics can be integrated to support consistent evaluation and decision-making. Perhaps most powerfully, the chapter highlights links to SKM implementations from other higher education institutions—allowing leaders to explore how peers structure and run their organizations, accelerating learning and reducing duplication of effort through shared, explainable institutional intelligence.

Many of the book’s chapters have a companion video which can be viewed for free on the Higher Education Leadership Learning Online Community web site. Visit the site to see the complete and evolving list.

If you’re involved in higher-ed leadership, strategy, assessment, or institutional research, I’d love for you to take a look at the chapter and add your comments below. If you would like assistance implementing any of the ideas addressed, please compete a consultation request form – the first hour is free for any institution.