Universities are complex organisms by nature, with many internal and external stakeholders requiring different things. So compromise is the order of the day.

But what are you often left with. A box-ticking exercise and not much more?

Done right, defining a clear set of university values can shape your culture, how people interact together, and galvanise them behind a shared vision.

We share a few thoughts on how best to approach the task.

The experience, knowledge and passion of your internal team can be blended with the challenge, broad-sector experience and outsider perspective of an external team.

Creatively that relies on two key elements.

If you want better stakeholder alignment, engagement and effectiveness on your next brand or marketing project, consider assembling a Rocketship team. We explain what it is, why it works and how to go about creating one.

In our experience, the tendency for universities and innovation hubs to delve into details and miss the big story determines whether a brand is actually launched/redefined or not.

This tendency is common in both the commercial and academic worlds.

This might help to get you started.

Your university, faculty or innovation hub may have resolved the important challenges of defining its Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values – and it may have found a way to tell a powerful, engaging story. So you may feel you're done, right?

Unfortunately, this is where things often fall down.

Complex organisations with multiple stakeholders like universities, faculties, and innovation hubs, can lead to equally complicated narratives.

👊 This makes cut-through to your audiences incredibly difficult. So simplifying the complex is critical.

👍 Here's a provocation, a potential solution and some practical examples of how it's been applied.

We’re told that keeping it simple is core to building an accessible brand, but great brands are built from dramatised details rather than abstract generics.

A brand refresh takes a lot of work. Alongside its rollout across communications and other brand assets, its ultimate test comes in how well it shapes how an organisation thinks and behaves.

How important is having a clear and compelling brand when building a spinout? Organisations at this critical growth stage often need to improve the role brand plays. But instead, it’s easy to believe brand isn’t a priority for now when telling more people about that product feels like the most important job to focus on. 

Find and remove the obstacles to more creative and innovative work. Tips for Research, Innovation and Enterprise leadership teams.

Shared Values are increasingly referred to by corporate partners as a reason for choosing which university, faculty or enterprise hub to collaborate with.

If the Values are lived (not just written), they help to establish behaviours.

Before deciding and communicating what your university or innovation hub does, ask yourself why it exists.

The answer should not be to increase access to funding. That is a by-product of doing something more important that’s going to create value by positively impacting the world.

There is an understandable tension that arises when ‘someone else’ is brought in to work on a project. The internal team can feel overlooked and under-appreciated. The external team can feel wary of being limited by narrow thinking and internal politics.

But when you get it right you get the best of both worlds and this project is a perfect example.

We’ve become so obsessed with driving immediate metrics that our ability to create memories falls aside. When brand builders create advertising that responds to a think/feel/do prompt, they ignore that brands are memory retrieval devices, and therefore the most critical action for them to prompt is remembering.

We’ve developed a considerable amount of knowledge by working with a wide range of organisations at the nexus of academic research, entrepreneurialism and investment for collaborative ventures.

And one of the insights we’ve discovered might sound prosaic but we can promise you, its importance shouldn’t be underestimated.

I really hope this article is useless to you in the very near future. But it just might be vital right now. Because there’s an inescapable truth that innovative scale-ups, spin-outs and startups would do well to heed.

How cultivating a brand can supercharge the impact of Research, Innovation and Enterprise in universities and innovation hubs.

Building a brand is about creating a consistent and meaningful experience for customers that reflects the values and personality of the brand. I’ll spell it out straight from the start and we’ll work back from there: you cannot ‘build’ a brand, you can just create the right environment and prompts for it to thrive.

The antidote to a lack of audience attention isn’t being quicker, it’s being interesting. Despite being bombarded with ads, clickbait, and 15-second viral videos, when creating a brand story, quicker isn’t better, better is better. The truth is, humanity isn’t changing as fast as the algorithms would have us believe.