Geoff —I'm not sure, I think we often miss the point. treating innovation as if it’s some optional extra that sits on top of “discipline, graft, and clarity”, when in reality those behaviours are the engine of innovation itself. Universities could be seen factories for “inspiration”; they were built to teach the exact cognitive disciplines that make innovation inevitable — problem framing, systems thinking, mechanism analysis, and purposeful iteration. That is innovation.
Your point about “given enough time and resources you can teach anyone anything” actually reinforces this: if you can teach discipline, clarity, and structured reasoning, then you can teach the very architecture that produces innovative outcomes. Very important outcomes.
And I guess the idea that “innovation may not be the answer” only shows a misunderstanding of what innovation actually is — it isn’t a shiny end product, it’s the disciplined thinking that prevents wasted effort and clarifies aims in the first place.
So yes, universities are supposed to do this, and when they don’t, that’s a failure of execution, not a limitation of the concept. The argument you made drifts a little off target — it misses somewhat the system in which the target sits.
