As I share my first blog post today, I am very proud and excited to share with you our new strategy.
It’s a celebration of a global conversation inspired by hundreds of hours of engagement with our entire multi-campus community throughout 2018. I want to thank every staff member, student, alumni and partner who played such an important part in shaping and refining our thinking. We should feel energised by our strategy and inspired to work, innovate and learn together in order to shape the future.
Our long-term strategy is emerging during times of immense change, not only in our sector but also politically, socially and economically. Uncertainty is all around us and we cannot avoid its impact. This creates challenges but also many opportunities for us to realise our ambitions. To succeed, we need to be able to change and adapt to the global environment. Our vision is to be world-leading within all our areas of specialism. Not just leading, but world-leading, with the freedom to explore new areas of specialism while building on those areas in which we are already excelling.
Heriot-Watt University has almost two centuries of experience and history behind us laying the foundations for the next two hundred years. It’s important that we reflect on our heritage, taking the time to celebrate our past. We are rooted in the ideal of self-improvement through education to raise the skills of our community and foster social and economic well-being. From the very start, we were providing access to technical and scientific skills to men and women who could not afford advanced education. This belief in the connections between practical skills and intellectual endeavour, between self-improvement and intellectual advancement, and between business and academia are still at the core of our mission – to create and exchange knowledge that benefits society. We created the first ever Mechanics Institute and led a pioneering approach to widening access, welcoming students of many cultures and faiths.
Which brings me to our shared ethos: Our community of students, staff and alumni are at the heart of everything we do. Our distinctive strengths will continue to build a global University that pioneers innovation in education, research and enterprise.
A University is its people and that is why ensuring that we are ourselves a flourishing community of staff, students and alumni is critical to our future. Together we have the opportunity to shape ourselves this way and to decide to bring this about.
I believe that we are a University like no other and we must continue to be even more compelling, growing our international presence and making the most of our distinctiveness. We are a global university with a modern outlook. One that takes pride in our achievements and strives to make a difference in the world, starting with our global community.
Our values reflect who we are and what we do. We must be values led if we are to achieve the ambitious growth plans outlined in our strategy. We will need to be more focused on an interdisciplinary approach to research. We will embrace a positive education model to inspire our students to not only learn but also learn how to live positively. We will explore how we can be even more ‘digital first’ than we already are by accelerating what we can offer online. We will increase connections with business and create a hive for entrepreneurial activity. We will need to do things differently and work together in different ways. This is where our values can help us shape our thinking, inform our decisions and guide our behaviours.
The next six years will bring unprecedented change and we have the purpose, ambition and confidence in our strengths to accomplish our goals. I look forward to updating you on our progress and achievements in the months and years to come.
Celebrations to launch our new strategy are being planned at each of our five campuses. It’s a chance for students, staff, partners and alumni to join together and celebrate what it means to be part of our global Heriot-Watt community and look ahead to a future where we can shape tomorrow together. Watch out for details.
Please take the time to read about our new strategy and let me know what you think. How are you going to shape tomorrow? Leave a comment and let me know.
Professor Richard A. Williams
Principal and Vice-Chancellor
Hello All,
It all boils down to having a successful combination of leaders and strategies. I feel that this is a perfect time for the people we have at this point would be a winning combination to see new milestones reached ease. I take this opportunity to congratulate the Principal and the top management for tirelessly pursuing the institutional goals and strategies. Happy to be a tiny part of this amazing team.
HW is a great university and very progressive. I am seeing attempts to use digitization and social media more and upgrade the way information is shared and received.
The term VUCA originates in the military and means Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This is certainly true of the world today and affects education and academia. However, leaders must be flexible and adapting to such parameters and one can only do their best under those circumstances within the boundaries of their human capacity. Sometimes a little divine help is welcomed.
May God bless the principal, staff and students as we hope for a brighter future!
Thank you for your comment. It is important we stand and shape the future, as you say, in an environment that is full of complexity and uncertainty. I want use to feel we can develop a flourishing community in future years
I think a lot of time has been spent on this ‘bottom-up’ strategy with many people having being involved and I’m excited for its implementation. I personally would like to see the values; belong, inspire, collaborate and celebrate, permeate into everything we do in a way that they haven’t always in the past.
Thank you. Game on. Patrick I wait your poem on values
It is a great achievement for our university to launch strategy 2025 at this time of global change and digital revolution. I think most of the important aspects are covered in the document but I don’t see enough focus on Corporate Social Responsibility. I believe the university should have a CSR strategy as part of strategy 2025 that organises social, envitonmental and economic initiatives across all campuses and online. It is very important to have CSR embedded in our learning and teaching systems as well as in our operations and management practices. One of the targets would be to start publishing sustainability/ CSR report on annual basis.
Karima,
Good to see you raising Corporate Social Responsibility. We had a lengthy conversation about it at one of the focus group sessions I attended. We all agreed it was fundamentally important and discussed how best to include it in Strategy 2025. The view was it was well captured under “Flourishing Communities”.
So for me I’ll be experimenting how best to align our research and learning & teaching towards CPR, civic mission etc through the Flourish Communities theme.
I’m really excited about this………
Thanks for raising this. As we are charity we don’t have quite the same take on CSR as the “for-profits” corporations do… infact we need to have an even greater volume and focus on these matters! Our mission IS to impact society as an agency of change through the talents we nurture and research we translate.
As for sustainability, I agree we need to think how to express and grow this. Of course there is the statutory regulations we will aim to adhere or exceed on, but we need to do much more. This needs to be a topic of wider debate across our University community. If you read our Strategy (soon to come out in illustrated version) it says we will identify some major projects from our own research that will impact on a global scale. So we have the ambition flagged and ahead we need to focus on how we can best deliver this.
Some staff in Malaysia campus have suggest we should join some global university alliances around sustainability and I am looking at this. These also provide a forum to publish our achievements on a global platform
I’m really happy to see that our *values* are all about “doing” things: eg at the most basic level, that they are all verbs!
These are concepts I can get behind and be proud of achieving: I look forward to increasing *collaboration* with colleagues, and increased *celebration* across the university as we evidence this strategy.
Thanks for your comments and also, may I say, for how you model this in the exciting work you are leading with the wider community,
The launch of our new strategy is a significant event. The strategy was developed through a large-scale conversation across all of our locations and with our colleagues, current students and former students. It’s great to see the microsite transitioning from being a place where we shaped our ideas to a place where we’ll hear updates and interact as we deliver our new strategy.
As Heriot-Watt moves toward its bicentenary, it is also worth noting the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mary Burton on the 7th February 2019. She persuaded the Watt Institution and School of Arts to open its classes to female students in 1869. We should be proud to have a building named after this amazing pioneer who went on to become our first woman director in 1874.
In moving into the next 200 years, our new strategy sees us reaffirming that pioneering spirit in our education and committing to pursue our longstanding widening access agenda. Both will be important in the changing environment to which the Principal refers in his first 2025 blog.
I am excited by Strategy 2025, our Vision, Mission, common ethos and values.
Indeed, Strategy 2025 appeared very early in my horizon, well before I joined the University (around April 2018) and was a key driver then in my decision to join HWU. I stand to be corrected and I am assuming work would had commenced in earnest on the development of the strategy around this time but it was what I took away from conversations with the Principal and Secretary of the University amongst others on this new strategy, that played a critical part in my decision to take up the inaugural COO role at our Dubai campus. Having previously worked with the senior leadership at both RMIT and Monash University to develop their 5 year strategies respectively, I was curious and excited to be part of the development and implementation of Strategy 2025.
In short, I have been inspired by Strategy 2025, what it embodies and the promise it holds for our staff and students- our collective future. Whilst being the overarching framework for how we wish to move forward on one level, Strategy 2025 readily and effortlessly transforms itself into one that we can relate to on a personal level. This makes it rather unique.
By unequivocally stating that the community of students, staff and alumni are at the heart of everything we do, it follows that it needs to be inherent in our every action taken to be mindful, reflect and ensure we delight each and every section of our community by providing the most extraordinary service that will leave an indelible mark on them in their time at Heriot Watt University.
I am looking forward to sharing the Strategy and discussions that took place at the recent Global ULF in Edinburgh at the next formal PS team meeting on 31 January and to the formal launch of the Strategy in Dubai in March 2019.
Thanks for your comment and we are delighted you chose to join the team here. I agree it is very important to listen to what students and colleagues prioritise. I like your thought that we can take true delight in serving each others’ needs effectively. Lets go for it!
Thanks Robert and for your insight in making sure the whole Heriot-Watt community has chance to co-create and shape the strategy. I think ahead of our bicentenary we need to list and heroes of our past and celebrate them as you suggest. We have had some transformational staff and students down the year, especially women who have driven change. It is part of our precious heritage and current mission.
Hello
I believe that we should all be striving to deliver a unique personalized student experience. This should begin from the enquiry level through to graduation. I am new to the University and not sure we deliver this throughout an applicants and students journey.
For me I believe in giving accurate and useful information in a timely manner and this is something I will strive to do in my new job. This also includes providing support to International students who are progressing from another University to Heriot Watt, for example from UG to PG. I feel we should help those students with their visa extension applications even before they are a student with us. I know from past experience that when you offer this kind of support it gives added student satisfaction.
Peter, I could not agree more and will add if you don’t mind, that the personalised student experience should start as you rightly point out from the time of inquiry but well beyond the point of graduation. Industry connects and life long learning positions the student well within the broader web of the university’s scope and reach post graduation. As a professional service provider, i will be aiming to provide and instil in my team to reflect and deliver a superlative service, one that is uncommon and with students at the heart of all that we do.
Thanks for your comment Peter, you are my inaugural blogger correspondent. I agree the student journey through inquiry, application , as a student and alumnus is critical and there is much we can do here. Thanks for your support in focusing on the first contact and application process and your interest in how we can foster and drive UG to PG transitions and visa support. These are important points to pick up. Richard