How Libraries Can Create Their Own Futures

As libraries navigate an era of rapid disruption—cultural shifts, institutional closures, mergers, relentless budget reallocations—adaptation is not optional. Those who fail to evolve with strategy and purpose will survive as a shell of themselves—if they survive at all.

In this article, I’ll explore the balance between innovation and operational excellence—the Innovation-Operations Perpetual Motion Engine—and argue that both are essential for survival and sustained success. I am using as a case study the Kraemer Family Library (KFL) and the other divisions I oversee as dean of libraries at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) including C3 Innovation, an initiative that supports collaboration between academia, industry, and society and is the cornerstone of the innovation ecosystem at UCCS.

My approach integrates two core principles. The first is the “borderlands of innovation,” where creativity emerges from the collision of diverse ideas, perspectives, and disciplines. The second is a venture capital approach to betting on the future while maintaining operational excellence, which I’ve previously explored. I’ve also adapted ideas from frameworks including Agile (a management approach focused on flexibility and continuous improvement), Lean (a management approach focused on cutting waste, streamlining processes, and continuous improvement), and portfolio project management. Together, these principles drive the Innovation-Operations Perpetual Motion Engine, which shapes our work at UCCS and demonstrates how organizations can create ongoing innovation while maintaining operational excellence.

A False Choice

Leadership is often framed as a choice between innovation versus legacy systems and creativity versus operational control. Visionary leaders are considered dreamers, while operational and tradition-focused leaders are seen as lacking vision or creativity. This perspective constrains leaders, organizations, faculty, and staff, who often lack the support to experiment and reshape their roles. Moreover, as disruptive technologies impact academic libraries, those operating with binary mindsets risk falling behind.

Effective leadership is not about choosing between tradition and innovation but navigating both fluidly based on context. Innovative and adaptive organizations emerge through intentional design, the balance between structure and flexibility, continuous experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. This requires building systems, cultures, and professional development structures that support both operational and innovative excellence. It also requires making difficult decisions and, at times, breaking long-term organizational norms.

The Borderlands

Most innovation happens in the borderlands, where disciplines, industries, and perspectives intersect to create new opportunities and challenge conventional disciplinary silos. Library leaders must actively engage with a broad range of disciplines, industries, and perspectives, including processes from business and public administration. Moreover, they should cultivate this approach within their organizations by providing professional development opportunities that expose faculty and staff to diverse ways of thinking and disciplines outside librarianship. This includes interdisciplinary conferences, interdisciplinary research collaborations, and partnerships with outside industries that intersect with library work.

Making Big Bets

As I’ve previously detailed, I believe that the future of cultural heritage institutions, particularly academic research libraries, depends on their ability to break free from risk aversion, library monoculture, and incrementalism in practice and process. Rather than merely adapting to external disruptions, we must disrupt ourselves. This requires moving from maintaining legacy systems to creating new structures that redefine roles within the research ecosystem.

We can achieve this through a framework that prioritizes initiatives with outsized returns and introduces entirely new services rather than modifying existing ones. In this framework, libraries prepare for unpredictable disruptions through scenario planning, continuous incremental improvements, and grassroots innovation. The framework emphasizes talent management and rejects status-based hierarchies. To achieve operational excellence, the framework incorporates a number of tools: streamlined decision-making, reduced bureaucracy, replacing standing committees with agile cross-functional task forces, radical transparency, institutional autonomy, and visionary leadership. Finally, it rejects one-size-fits-all models, instead encouraging diverse strategies tailored to each institution’s strengths and challenges.

The Innovation-Operations Perpetual Motion Engine

While innovation and creativity thrive in the borderlands through clustering and collision, they do not thrive in chaos. Guiding principles must be in place. The guiding principle in my organization is the Perpetual Motion Engine, a system that establishes strong operational foundations to support innovation and enable continuous development. At UCCS, we’ve built this engine through a series of initiatives. Here’s how:

Leadership

To achieve true innovation and operational excellence in academic libraries, leaders must operate as executives, not super librarians. Rather than extending previous expertise to an executive role, library leaders should focus on developing strategy, mastering finances, securing sustainable funding, and building agreement among stakeholders while fostering a culture of creativity, breaking down bureaucratic barriers, and making sure every contribution is valued.

• Master Financial Levers: At UCCS, leaders have secured sustainable funding through grants, partnerships, and strategic financial management—such as renegotiating endowments to be more flexible, timely, and aligned with current and future needs.
• Strategic Foresight: To prepare for multiple futures and ensure our innovation model adapts to funding shifts and institutional changes, we conduct frequent iterative scenario planning on different budget forecasts and the future of disruptive technology like quantum computing.
• Spanning Boundaries: I build relationships with political and institutional stakeholders across campus to remove obstacles and open pathways for innovation.
• Integrated Innovation: With input from other stakeholders, I direct strategy and investment while faculty and staff take the lead on developing, creating, and implementing solutions. This prevents a top-heavy bureaucracy.
• Creativity in Culture/Systems: I bring external innovators into our work through hiring, training, and workshops. For example, at KFL, our inventor-in-residence conducts regular training, audits systems, and sits in on meetings to ensure innovation is part of the dialogue.

Hacking the Bureaucracy

Slow approval cycles and top-heavy decision-making kill organizations and damage morale. We must break these systems by eliminating roadblocks, decentralizing decision-making, empowering staff, and replacing bottlenecks with real-time action. I’ve built a system where staff openly propose ideas, short-term task forces drive progress, and individuals collaborate across functions. As a result, innovation happens quickly, impact is recognized, and the organization stays dynamic.

• Breakthroughs: We replaced all standing committees with short-term task forces focused on specific projects with clear goals and timelines, empowering faculty and staff to drive progress without waiting for administrative approvals.
• Transparency: To make sure ideas are judged on potential rather than hierarchy, we established a weekly project meeting in the dean’s office—an open forum where any faculty or staff member can propose ideas. This grassroots approach has already sparked dozens of initiatives, including projects that earned a national diversity award.
• Organizational Visibility: To make sure that the work of the library does not go unnoticed in the larger organization, we make all of our projects are highly visible and celebrate those who work on them.
• Breaking Down Silos: We’ve replaced isolated department work with cross-functional projects. A key example is our storytelling initiative, in which an endowed professor advances the University’s culture of storytelling; the project has amplified underrepresented voices and expanded how stories are preserved and celebrated on campus, while diversifying the library’s digital collections and programming.

Betting on the Future

I bet on the future like a venture capitalist, which means investing in a portfolio of ideas, giving the most promising ones more time and resources, and recognizing that a single breakthrough can change everything.

• Iteration: If an idea is not gaining traction, we pivot or shut it down, which supports effective resource allocation.
• Scale: When something proves successful, we double down, allocating resources and expanding its reach.
• Funding Innovation: We maintain a dedicated micro-funding pool to secure the success of high-potential projects. Any potentially high-impact project that is pitched is immediately approved with seed funding to investigate and pilot.

Creativity and Experimentation

True innovation comes from breaking outdated structures and embracing creativity at every level. Instead of focusing on rigid credentials and narrow research expectations, we invest in diverse talent, interdisciplinary thinking, and skill-based growth. By fostering a culture where experimentation is encouraged, failure is a learning tool, and big ideas are rewarded, we create a library that continuously evolves and leads rather than follows.

• Redesigning Requirements for Promotion and Tenure (RPT): We encourage faculty to publish in any discipline, which supports creativity and diffuses other disciplines into library science.
• Removing the MLIS Requirement: We hire based on skill and experience rather than credentials, which allows us to bring in diverse talent that challenges our thinking. This approach made possible the creation of the professorship for our storytelling initiative and the development of a new role for an innovation and design librarian.
• Professional Development Beyond Librarianship: We support faculty and staff in pursuing professional development in storytelling, design, computer science, and other fields that foster interdisciplinary problem-solving, which helps shape how we think about librarianship.
• Certified in Project Management: We’ve made project management a core skill across our organization by sponsoring Google Project Management certification for all staff and faculty. This has improved our team’s management and operational excellence.
• Incentives: We actively champion creative and innovative projects by providing awards and stipends. We recognize individual contributions at awards ceremonies, give real-time shout-outs when projects are completed, and highlight achievements in newsletters, showing that no effort goes unnoticed and making invisible contributions visible.

Creativity Culture

Creativity thrives when barriers are removed, people are trusted, and work is measured in impact, not time. We foster flexibility, experimentation, and continuous learning to make creativity a core part of daily operations, not just an occasional initiative.

• Defaulting to Yes: No idea is rejected outright. If the resources are available, we move it forward for consideration and assessment. This has activated the entire organization, giving staff and faculty the confidence to voice their thoughts, propose projects, and take ownership of innovation.
• Time: As long as core responsibilities are met, we give faculty and staff flexibility to spend their time creating, innovating, and pushing projects forward. We prioritize outcomes over activity, allowing structured autonomy and dedicating meeting-free weeks each semester to foster deep work and new ideas.
• Wellness Breaks: All staff receive three 30-minute breaks per week for mental or physical health that do not impact vacation, sickness, or personal leave.
• Continuous Organizational Improvement: We build institutional learning and knowledge sharing into every project, with after-action reviews ensuring each initiative informs the next round of innovation. Lessons, charters, resources, and progress reports are shared openly—both digitally and physically—so the entire organization benefits.
• Project Portfolio Management: KFL operates as a project-driven organization, balancing operations and innovation through portfolio management. All initiatives are tracked via a project management board that provides visibility and allows for quality control.
• Improvement Across the Organization: Staff continuously identify inefficiencies, test solutions in real time, and bring attention to problems.

Closing Thoughts

At UCCS, we have intentionally designed a system in which staff and faculty are not passive participants in change but active creators of the future, with the tools, safety, autonomy, and support they need to experiment, ideate, and create perpetual motion.

As a result, we have received national awards, raised millions of dollars of private philanthropy, and created groundbreaking programs. We have also improved morale and work-life balance, increased average salaries by ten percent, and firmly established the library as the center of the university’s innovation ecosystem.

The Innovation-Operations Perpetual Motion Engine is not a singular model but a collection of ideas that create momentum for ongoing innovation and operational excellence. I challenge libraries to build their own frameworks that fuse creativity, innovation, and operational excellence to shape a future where they survive and thrive.

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