Make It New
Innovate, take risks and spark curiosity to become a leader in the discovery and sharing of new knowledge.
Making a better future requires us to innovate fearlessly—discovery requires taking risks and accepting that failure precedes success. Our culture must empower people to take the intellectual and scholarly risks that enable the innovation needed to improve the human condition.
We will explore beyond the boundaries of current knowledge and provide opportunities for students to engage in this work. We will work to understand and exploit connections between disciplines such as technology and business or health and art. We will embrace the critical and disruptive approaches needed to reveal new knowledge and define new areas of inquiry.
To do this, we will:
Embrace risk taking and a philosophy of fast failure as vital to innovation and learning.
We will change how we teach and modernize student and faculty assessment to encourage academic risk taking and intellectual curiosity. We will create opportunities for high-risk, high-reward research while encouraging novel approaches to education and pedagogy. We will enable faculty, staff and students to employ entrepreneurial thinking to enhance our internal operations and our external impact.
Pursue understanding in emerging areas.
New areas of inquiry emerge as ideas; technologies and disciplines are created and developed. To lead in research, Lehigh faculty, staff and students must help to define the questions and approaches that will guide others as they explore and disrupt these new domains. We will work beyond disciplines, engage in constructive discourse, and take on complex problems because we have the capacity to do so and the world needs our leadership.
Be nimble, dynamic and future-focused.
Lehigh will chart the course to the future, challenging complacency and confronting the status quo. We will prioritize staff and faculty development and recognize scholarship and research achievements. We will evaluate existing programs and structures against their future value, and we will focus on the future as we develop new ways of delivering services and conducting our work.