2025 IEP Designee – University of Iowa

The APLU IEP Designation acknowledges the University of Iowa’s contributions to and ongoing commitment to the prosperity and quality of life for Iowa and the world. As the state of Iowa’s oldest higher education institution, expanding the prosperity of Iowans was a mission assigned by the state legislature when it established the University of Iowa (UI) in 1847 and remains a core mission today. The UI is to: “bring learning and discovery into the service of the people of the state of Iowa, the nation, and the world, improving lives through education, health care, arts and culture, and community and economic vitality”. From the very beginning, the University of Iowa worked to improve Iowa’s communities and businesses through education, research, and engagement.

“The Innovation & Economic Prosperity Designation from APLU highlights the University of Iowa’s commitment to using the knowledge, skills and discoveries of our faculty, staff and students to provide solutions for the challenges facing Iowa’s communities and the world,” Dr. David Schwebel, the UI’s Vice President for Research, said reflecting on news of the University’s designation as an APLU IEP institution.

The IEP process revealed deeply embedded values shared across the UI campus. The twelve academic colleges each independently pursue active engagement activities with communities across the State of Iowa and with businesses, organizations, and other groups from across the nation. Iowa’s academic units recognize the significance of developing outside relationships to advance their own interests while also serving as a principal means of positively translating knowledge and skills from academia to productive use outside academia.

There is strength found in this decentralization. Each college and department pursues external relationships suited to their own interests and needs, ensuring their commitment is genuine and impactful. As needs of external partners change, the impacted UI partners can adjust to meet those new demands or allow others to assume their roles when there is better alignment of interests and skills. This flexibility enables programs to end, evolve, and grow over time.

Our self-study revealed some important needs nevertheless, notably in cross-organizational information sharing and storytelling. In an organization as large as the University of Iowa, sharing information about best practices, accomplishments, needs, networks, and opportunities is challenging. To meet this need, the university tasks cross-cutting entities to help coordinate where possible, facilitate information sharing, and cultivate external relationships and opportunities. The Office of Strategic Communications, the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, the Office of Community Engagement, and the Office of Innovation each have unique missions while shouldering responsibilities to build internal capacity to promote engagement.

As we move forward, the IEP effort suggests these entities need to consistently invest in their capacity to take broad views of activities and programs across the campus and that central leadership should both empower them to do so while directing the academic units to support those activities, recognizing the mutual benefit arising from an effective information sharing system.

Success breeds success (and copying!). Learning how some have succeeded provides pathways that others can follow. By connecting the IEP effort at the UI with our ongoing Strategic Planning Review process (known as the SPARC and its associated subcommittees), we took important steps to make sure the observations and lessons arising from the self study and our engagement with other IEP universities can be fed into Iowa’s future planning and assessment efforts. The decision to connect with the ongoing Strategic Planning process was made early in our IEP self study. Iowa took this step first to leverage a deeply ingrained ongoing institutional effort as the plan called for economic and community engagement as central institution-wide missions. Even more importantly, connections with the ongoing implementation and assessment of the plan provide established and institutionally recognized channels to disseminate information and encourage replication of successful engagement efforts.

Communicating opportunities for engagement along with the means and mechanisms to engage were another key lesson derived from the IEP assessment. The collegiate-based approach revealed strong but relatively narrow ties – in other words, relationships between the colleges and their key external stakeholders were robust but at times the number of those external partners was more limited than desired. Further, interviews with both collegiate leaders and external organizations (business and non-profits) showed both sides struggled at times to initiate new relationships. They did not know either who to speak with or how to begin a programmatic relationship. Here, the central organizations have important roles to play because of their broader perspectives and diverse networks. They can help play matchmaker while facilitating the development of pilot programs that serve to test partnerships.

Lessons learned during the IEP process and our continued engagement will only serve to improve how Iowa fulfills its mission – to “bring learning and discovery into the service of the people of the state of Iowa, the nation, and the world.”

Author:

Jeff Kueter
Director, Strategic Initiatives and External Engagement, Office of Innovation
University of Iowa