Strategic Opportunities: A Decision Making and Development Framework

Over the next five years, the University will enhance its capacity to systematically build and successfully implement ambitious, multidisciplinary initiatives. These initiatives will serve our communities, address complex local and global challenges, enhance sustainability, create exciting new educational opportunities, and address emerging local and regional concerns. These are the kinds of projects that can change the University, our region, and people’s lives. They will also require us to pull together in shared directions and to build new skills and mechanisms for better supported and more flexible cross-institutional collaboration. The achievement of the institution’s foundational commitments will play a key role in our success.

To maximize impact, project development will emphasize thoughtful integration of strategic priorities and foundational commitments. This might, for example, involve the integration of elements such as the advancement of interdisciplinary research and creative activity, for-credit curriculum and life-long learning programs, experiential learning opportunities, and community partnerships. While not every project can integrate all strategic priorities, an approach that systematically explores their greater integration will maximize the potential impact of our initiatives.

During the consultation phase of strategic planning, on- and off-campus community members proposed a number of possible topic areas for new programs, new and often interdisciplinary areas of research, and specific potential areas of focus for enhanced community engagement, partnership, and services. This input will be invaluable to planning as the more specific academic and research strategic plans unfold.

Major strategic opportunities could focus on a specific topic or area. For example, a new partnership between the University and the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit (WECHU) will result in co-location and joint programming opportunities. The co-location effort will engage with material re-use in line with our environmental sustainability goals, as a retrofit of a vacant building on campus is planned. This partnership will bring together existing cross-campus research and educational strengths in public and environmental health, and institutional priorities around employee and student mental health and wellness. The partnership will also provide opportunities to focus on new work-integrated learning opportunities, and neighbourhood priorities around health.

Strategic opportunities could also focus on activities such as building, enhancing, and expanding an area of institutional practice into a major institutional pillar – for example, undergraduate research, or inclusive leadership.

Our goal is to create a systematic, streamlined, and transparent approach to identifying and supporting initiatives to maximize their impact. This planning framework is open to a wide range of potential initiatives and is not topic specific. It will provide greater transparency in decision making, support new ways to collaborate, optimize the chances of success, cross-leverage funding sources, and maximize project impact.

Identification and development of new projects will be cyclical, through mechanisms identified as the University develops strategic academic and strategic research plans that will unfold from the Aspire strategic plan. These mechanisms will involve regular cross-campus and community consultations and collision opportunities to develop new ideas. Exploration of emerging opportunities driven by, for example, regional change would also be informed by the following guidelines, with the recognition that some projects do require an agile response.

Key criteria in identifying promising projects will include the integration of some or all of the following:

• Addresses key areas of institutional risk
• Advances Indigenization, Truth and Reconciliation
• Allows for multiple points of entry and engagement
• Drives enrolment
• Engages with multiple strategic priorities, and multiple communities
• Improves the student experience
• Integrates equity-focused approaches and practice
• Involves areas of institutional strength
• Practice in the area is strong on campus, and resources exist, but activities are under-leveraged or under-coordinated
• Offers a unique opportunity (in combination with other criteria)
• Resonates with critical campus, regional, or global challenges
• Speaks to our values and core aspirations
• Will be financially sustainable

While not every project can integrate all priorities, initiatives that can clearly demonstrate alignment with a greater number of the criteria above and greater integration across strategic priorities will be prioritized for investment and development. A first set of specific projects will be identified and built out during strategic academic and research plan development.

We look forward to developing specific projects with communities on and off campus as we implement Aspire.