The Platform University
A Whitepaper and a Series of Webinars.
Boundaryless Team
The Platform University Whitepaper and Webinars
In the face of unprecedented challenges and the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of today’s world, universities must rethink how they engage, create value, and operate.
The Platform University, a collaboration between RMIT FORWARD in Australia and Boundaryless in Europe, offers a transformation agenda rooted in global expertise and industry-proven practices. Leveraging Platform Organisation models and the Ecosystem-Enabling Entrepreneurial Organization (3EO) framework, we empower universities to become dynamic, flexible hubs of entrepreneurial innovation. This transformation reimagines the university’s structure, culture and operations, to enable continuous innovation, agile responsiveness to market shifts and the seamless integration of internal and external resources.
Authored by Pete Cohen and Peter Thomas from RMIT FORWARD and Simone Cicero from Boundaryless, our foundational whitepaper ‘The Platform University’ presents a transformative vision for universities, grounded in Platform Organisation models that enable entrepreneurial ecosystem capabilities.
This paper looks at the pressing challenges universities face today – financial instability, escalating competition, evolving student expectations, difficulties adapting to market demands, and emerging geopolitical pressures.
The solution we propose to these challenges is a shift towards an entrepreneurial culture that drives innovation, fosters ecosystem-wide collaboration and builds flexible, market-responsive structures—equipping universities to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
To download the Whitepaper and be timely informed about new dates for the upcoming Webinars as soon as they get published, please submit your request using the form below.
Webinar #1: The Platform University
Today’s universities are products of centuries of evolution shaped by social, economic, and political forces. In the face of unprecedented challenges and the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of today’s world, universities must start to rethink how they engage, create value, and operate.
The Platform University, a collaboration between RMIT FORWARD in Australia and Boundaryless in Europe, offers a transformation agenda rooted in global expertise and industry-proven practices. Leveraging Platform Organisation models and Entrepreneurial-Enabling Ecosystem (3EO) concepts, we empower universities to become dynamic, flexible hubs of entrepreneurial innovation. This transformation reimagines the university’s structure, culture, and operations, enabling continuous innovation, agile responsiveness to market shifts and the seamless integration of internal and external resources.
Join Pete Cohen (RMIT FORWARD), Simone Cicero (Boundaryless) and Peter Thomas (RMIT FORWARD) for a discussion of the recently released ‘The Platform University’ whitepaper that looks at the pressing challenges universities face today and how it is possible to create an entrepreneurial culture that drives innovation, fosters ecosystem-wide collaboration, and builds flexible, market-responsive structures and equip universities to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
Who should attend: higher education strategists, policymakers, Platform Organisation practitioners and anyone interested in the future of higher education.
The Platform University: 4th November (9AM CET, 7PM AEDT) on LinkedIn live.
Webinar #2: Bringing The Platform University to Life
The Platform University whitepaper explores how universities can use Platform Organisation models to decentralize decision-making and empower autonomous units to create an entrepreneurial culture that encourages innovation and rapid adaptation, facilitates ecosystem collaboration, and creates flexible, market-responsive structures.
But this kind of transformation is not without its challenges. Universities operate in a complex governance and regulatory landscape where changes to structure or operations are likely to require approval from accrediting bodies, government agencies, and other stakeholders, and transformation, at any scale, is complex and challenging and requires significant commitment and a degree of culture change.
Join Pete Cohen, Peter Thomas (RMIT FORWARD), Frank Buechele (The Australian National University (ANU)), and Simone Cicero (Boundaryless), for a discussion about how small-scale experiments and pilot projects such as RMIT FORWARD can unlock benefits, uncover key challenges, foreground inhibitors, and articulate some of the context-specific tactics that are needed to drive transformational change in higher education using Platform Organisation models.
Who should attend: higher education strategists, policymakers, Platform Organisation practitioners, and anyone interested in the future of higher education.
