Why universities should steal more ideas

By Laura Jackson and Emma Bayne, Principal Consultants / 2 October 2026

For all the debate about innovation in higher education, universities still look almost exclusively to other universities for inspiration. When faced with challenges around student experience, engagement, digital transformation, service delivery, or institutional culture, the sector's first instinct is usually to ask: What are other universities doing? 

It is an understandable response. Universities operate within unique academic and regulatory contexts. It is also an incredibly collegiate sector, where people are generous with both their time and expertise to solve common problems. But some of the biggest challenges facing higher education are not unique to universities at all. 

Healthcare providers manage complex user journeys involving multiple services. Retailers compete on experience in crowded markets. Banks build trust while using data to personalise support. Hotels create environments where people feel welcomed, valued, and understood. 

The more useful question is not whether universities are different, but whether other sectors have already solved the human problems that higher education is still wrestling with. 

Healthcare: Designing around the person, not the organisation 

Walk through any major NHS hospital and you will encounter a highly complex organisation comprising hundreds of specialisms, teams, and services. Yet from a patient's perspective, none of that complexity should matter. 

Modern healthcare increasingly focuses on 'patient pathways', mapping experiences from referral through diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and aftercare. The goal is to understand care as a connected journey rather than a series of isolated transactions. 

Universities face a remarkably similar challenge. 

Students do not experience their institution through organisational charts. They experience it through a sequence of key life events: 

• Applying 

• Arriving 

• Settling in 

• Finding support 

• Choosing modules 

• Completing assessments 

• Preparing for graduation 

When these journeys are poorly connected, students feel lost. 

One of the most powerful examples comes from healthcare's use of care coordinators and integrated pathways. Rather than expecting patients to navigate complexity themselves, healthcare organisations increasingly design services around the user's experience. 

Universities could apply the same thinking. 

Imagine if institutions mapped the first six weeks of a student's experience with the same rigour hospitals apply to patient pathways. How many hand-offs exist? Where does confusion occur? What information is repeated unnecessarily? Where do students abandon processes altogether? 

The insight is simple: most student frustrations are not caused by individual services failing. They arise because the experience between services has not been designed. 

The same principle underpins the UK Government Digital Service (GDS). Government recognised that citizens do not think in terms of departments, budgets or organisational structures; they simply want to achieve an outcome. Whether applying for a passport, reporting a life event or accessing support, people expect services to work across organisational boundaries. GDS therefore championed user-centred design, journey mapping and end-to-end service thinking, challenging departments to design around user needs rather than institutional structures. 

Many university processes remain fragmented because they reflect organisational structures rather than student needs. As a result, frustration often arises in the spaces between services rather than within them. 

The lesson from government is not simply about digital transformation. It is about adopting a fundamentally different design philosophy. Universities that genuinely map and redesign the student journey may discover that many of their biggest challenges are not resource problems at all, but design problems. 

Retail: Obsess over friction 

Retailers have spent decades studying a deceptively simple question: Why do people stop engaging? 

Consider Amazon. One of its most famous innovations was not a new product, but the reduction of friction through one-click ordering. Supermarkets apply the same principle when they redesign stores, websites and apps to make shopping easier, faster and more intuitive. Every unnecessary barrier increases the likelihood that someone will disengage. 

Universities rarely describe student experience in these terms, but they should. 

Think about common student frustrations: 

• Finding the correct support service 

• Understanding academic regulations 

• Accessing accommodation information 

• Navigating virtual learning environments 

• Locating wellbeing support 

Many institutions continue to focus on providing services rather than understanding how easy those services are to find and use. Retailers know that customers rarely complain about friction. They simply stop engaging. 

Higher education has its own version of this problem. 

Students do not always submit complaints. They stop attending. They stop participating. They stop seeking help. By the time institutions notice, disengagement is already well established. The retail sector's obsession with journey mapping, usability testing, and customer behaviour offers a powerful challenge: 

How many barriers are we unintentionally placing in front of students? 

Financial services: Turn data into decisions 

Few sectors have undergone more profound digital transformation than financial services. Banks now routinely use data to understand behaviour, predict needs, identify risk, and personalise interventions. Importantly, they do not collect data for its own sake. The best financial institutions focus relentlessly on actionable insight. 

For example, spending patterns may indicate financial vulnerability, allowing support to be offered before a customer reaches crisis point. A significant change in digital activity can similarly prompt proactive engagement. 

The lesson for universities is significant. 

Most institutions now possess extraordinary volumes of information: 

• Attendance data 

• Assessment results 

• Survey responses 

• Library usage 

• Learning platform activity 

• Student support interactions 

Yet many institutions remain insight-poor despite being data-rich. 

Too often dashboards answer the question:"What happened?" 

Rather than: "What should we do about it?" 

The financial services sector demonstrates the value of combining data with human judgement. Data identifies patterns. Conversations explain causes. Together they enable better decisions. 

Institutions that successfully connect operational data with student narratives will be far better placed to understand engagement, belonging, wellbeing, and retention than those relying on either source in isolation. 

Hospitality: The science of belonging 

Perhaps the most powerful lesson about belonging comes from hospitality. 

Great hotels understand that guests remember how they felt long after operational details have faded. They may forget the size of the room, the colour of the walls or the artwork, but they remember whether they felt welcome. 

Hospitality leaders spend enormous amounts of time thinking about arrival experiences, emotional connections, and moments that matter. Universities often underestimate the importance of these same moments. 

Consider the beginning of the student journey. A university might invest millions in facilities, technology, and infrastructure. 

Yet for many first-year students the defining question remains: "Do I belong here?" 

The hospitality sector understands that belonging is not accidental. 

It is designed. 

Staff training, physical environments, communications, signage, digital interactions, and personal touches all contribute to a sense of welcome. 

The same principle applies on campus. 

Students form impressions about belonging every day: 

• Was it easy to get help? 

• Did someone recognise them? 

• Were they treated as an individual? 

• Did they understand where to go next? 

• Did they feel included? 

These moments accumulate over time. Belonging is rarely created through a single intervention. It emerges from hundreds of small experiences that consistently communicate: "You matter here." 

Museums: Reinventing the value proposition 

The museum sector has spent much of the past two decades responding to significant reductions in public funding. Between 2009/10 and 2019/20, local authority spending on museums and galleries across the UK fell by 27% in real terms, forcing institutions to rethink long-established operating models. 

The most successful museums did more than cut costs: they reimagined their purpose.

Collections remained central, but museums also became community anchors, educational partners, cultural venues, wellbeing providers and civic assets. They diversified income, built partnerships, expanded commercial activity and reached new audiences. In doing so, they developed broader and more resilient operating models. 

There is a powerful message here for higher education. Universities are facing growing pressure on traditional funding models, increasing competition and rising expectations from students and society. The institutions that thrive may not be those that simply do more of what they have always done. They may be those willing to rethink the value they create, the audiences they serve and the role they play within their communities. 

Museums also offer a particularly important lesson on accessibility. Increasingly, accessibility has moved beyond compliance and become part of experience design itself. Investment programmes have focused on removing barriers, improving physical and digital access and ensuring experiences are designed for wider participation from the outset. 

For universities, this raises an important question: what would happen if accessibility was viewed not as a specialist workstream, but as a core design principle shaping every aspect of the student and staff experience? 

Local libraries: Staying relevant through partnership 

If museums have reinvented their offer, libraries have arguably reinvented their purpose. 

Faced with digital disruption and recurring questions about their future relevance, many libraries have successfully repositioned themselves as community hubs rather than repositories of information. Across the UK, libraries now host family support services, digital inclusion programmes, employability initiatives, volunteering opportunities, community activities and wellbeing provision. They have become trusted places where multiple services come together around local need. 

What is particularly notable is that this transformation has been achieved through partnership. Libraries increasingly work with schools, local authorities, healthcare providers, charities, employers and community organisations to create richer, more relevant services. Their modern role depends on collaboration rather than institutional independence. 

There is a challenge here for universities. In a world where knowledge is no longer scarce, the question is not simply whether universities provide education. It is whether they remain indispensable to the communities they serve. 

The library sector demonstrates that long-term relevance comes not from defending traditional models but from continuously adapting to evolving needs. Future success may depend less on what universities can do alone and more on their ability to convene partnerships, connect expertise and create value across a wider ecosystem of employers, civic organisations, cultural institutions and lifelong learners. The institutions that flourish are likely to be those that become platforms for collaboration rather than simply providers of services. 

Like libraries, universities cannot assume their relevance. They must continually earn it. 

The most important lesson: Service recovery 

There is one further lesson universities should borrow, particularly from hospitality and aviation: 

Things go wrong. Flights are delayed. Hotel bookings are lost. Systems fail. 

No organisation delivers a perfect experience. What separates exceptional organisations is how they recover. 

Research across service industries suggests that, in some circumstances, customers whose problems are resolved well can become more loyal than those who experienced no problem at all. 

This is known as the service recovery paradox. 

Universities have traditionally been less comfortable with this idea. Although many run NSS-related “You said, we did” campaigns, these rarely address the difficulties arising from individual experiences or show students how the institution responds when something goes wrong. 

When students encounter difficulties, institutions frequently focus on explaining processes, assigning responsibility, or defending decisions. 

Students, however, tend to evaluate responses differently. 

They ask: 

• Did anyone listen? 

• Did anyone care? 

• Was anything done? 

An institution's reputation is often shaped less by failures themselves and more by how those failures are handled. In a sector facing increasing scrutiny and expectation, this may be one of the most valuable lessons of all. 

Looking beyond higher education 

Higher education does not need to become healthcare, retail, banking, hospitality, government, museums or libraries. It does, however, need to become better at recognising transferable ideas and adapting them intelligently to an academic context. 

The most innovative universities of the next decade are unlikely to be those that benchmark only against their competitors. They will look beyond the sector, identify ideas that address shared human needs and adapt them to the realities of higher education. Many of the sector’s hardest challenges are not uniquely academic. They are human. 

That is why the sectors that have spent decades understanding human behaviour may have more to teach universities than universities have yet recognised. 

How we can help 

If your institution mapped its most important student or staff journeys end-to-end, where would you discover friction, duplication or missed opportunities?  

The most effective transformations often begin with a deeper understanding of how people actually experience the institution, rather than how organisational structures assume they do.  

At Strive Higher, we help universities understand and redesign the experiences that sit between services, teams and organisational boundaries, improving both institutional performance and staff and student experience. If these challenges resonate, get in touch. We'd welcome a conversation.