The Changing Face of Higher Education: the Project-Oriented University

Nowadays, higher education is under a two-fold pressure. First, since universities create knowledge for fast-moving sectors, their educational mission and objectives may quickly become obsolete and irrelevant for the economy. Second, universities must keep up the pace with an ever changing environment. Both types of pressure force universities to (further) develop their innovativeness capacity. In a nutshell, universities must innovate and adapt to change in order to survive. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the project-management maturity of an organization and its managerial capacity to cope with change. The key assumption is that there is a correlation between the project management maturity of universities and their innovativeness capacity. In order to illustrate this, we have developed specific methodologies for assessing both the project management maturity and the innovativeness maturity of higher education institutions. We sought to test the feasibility of a new organizational model the project-oriented university model as a managerial alternative to the existing governance models in higher education. In our opinion, this is a new and feasible model for higher education institutions, a model that views maturity in project management as a means of enabling development and of increasing organization's (i.e. university) chances to cope with multiple transformations in the external environment.