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A small team. The newest tools. The shortest distance between an idea at Highlands College and a thing you can hold. This is an invitation to think together about what we could build next.
↓ Start with the visionImagine a place where anyone at Highlands College, from the people closest to students to the leaders carrying the whole vision, can bring an idea and reach a built, testable version in weeks instead of years.
Imagine the most powerful tools in the hands of the whole HC team, so the people who know the mission best are the ones shaping what comes next. Imagine formation that keeps faith with the moment it is happening in.
That is what HC Innovate is for. It is the innovation function for Highlands College, built to turn an idea into something you can see, use, and learn from, quickly and at low cost. AI is part of how it moves. The mission is why it moves.
Across Christian higher education, the field is moving unevenly. Surprisingly, Lipscomb has been the most aggressive. Through LUInnovate it has launched AI-integrated degrees and pushed tools across the whole campus, with no sign of slowing. They are ahead, and they mean to stay there. Southeastern has reached for it too — building real online breadth, naming innovation out loud — but the effort has tended to stall, folded back into existing offices before it could become a standing capability of its own. Most other schools are still deciding where to begin.
That uneven field is the opportunity, and it is specific. We do not need to out-scale Lipscomb or out-network Southeastern. Lipscomb is proving the tools work at a large, program-driven school. Southeastern is showing how hard this is to sustain when it is bolted onto something that already exists. The lane no one has truly claimed is the one that fits us best: faithful reinvention done deeply, in a residential community built to form people, not only to deliver content.
Highlands College already does things few others do, from the residential academy model to the hands-on training that defines us. There is room to do more, and the window is open now, while the tools are new and the lane is uncrowded. HC Innovate is how Highlands College steps into it on purpose.
HC Innovate is a small, fast team with one job: take an idea, build the smallest real version of it, and test it in the world, in weeks. It is innovation as a standing capability, not a one-time task force.
AI is its most powerful instrument, and the team would be fluent in it. But the function would exist, and would matter, with or without any single tool. The thinking comes first. The tools serve the thinking.
It serves the whole college. The invitation is open to anyone with something they have seen. And it is built especially to serve the people carrying the vision: leadership has the clearest view of where Highlands College is going, and HC Innovate exists to help get there faster, turning that vision into built things the institution can hold, adopt, or learn from.
None of this is theoretical. Each of these was imagined and built by a single individual, from first idea to finished artifact, in hours and days, with the kind of tools HC Innovate would put to work every week.
A formative week for HC students and partners together, in a city that teaches them both. Shared as a working site you could walk through, not a deck.
A live, mobile, offline-ready guide for a study trip. Fifteen stops, readings, and logistics, carried into the field. Built in a single evening.
The strategic master plan, rendered as an interactive experience leadership could explore and question, instead of a static PDF.
Where it could start
HC Innovate is the function that makes work like this normal instead of rare. The first sprints could be these. Held lightly, as a place to begin, not a fixed plan.
Put the newest tools, with real training, in the hands of the whole Highlands College team. The people who know the mission best, equipped to build with it. We start here because the best ideas will come from a team that can move. This is the on-ramp. The vision is bigger than it.
Highlands College promises every student 800 hours of hands-on ministry training. As we grow toward a thousand students, that becomes 800,000 hours of formation across eight majors and eight campuses. HC Innovate could build the system that makes those hours visible: light weekly logging, honest reflection, and AI-assisted insight into how students are actually being formed. Not to police a number, but to keep faith with the promise and understand the formation behind it.
Develop the first cohort with Advancement: HC students and a Highlands College partner formed together in a city that teaches them both. A week that forms people on both sides and deepens the partner relationship, where the cultivation is the formation, not a separate ask.
Explore what it could look like to prepare students for the part of a minister's life that formal training rarely reaches: dating, engagement, marriage, and family. For a minister, the health of the home is part of the calling. An honest exploration of what could serve, not a finished program.
Beyond these: microsites for flipped-classroom prework, purpose-built apps for missions trips, a dedicated HC student app that holds everything in one place. The list is not a roadmap. It is the range.
The method is simple on purpose. Speed comes from keeping it that way.
Anyone can bring an idea, in person, in conversation. Not a form to fill out.
Every idea is weighed against four questions.
The team builds the smallest real version and tests it, usually inside eight weeks.
Keep it, reshape it, or set it down and name what we learned. Honest either way.
The four questions
Does it extend what Highlands College is for: graduates ready for ministry, churches stronger because we exist?
Does it lift the depth or formation-value of something we already do well?
Does it remove a real, named pain for students, faculty, staff, or partners?
Does it make existing work meaningfully easier, faster, or more reliable?
Most work moves fast because most work is safe. Anything touching student records or sensitive data takes the careful path it should. Speed where we can. Care where we must.
Two kinds of evidence. First, what gets built: the specific things HC Innovate produces that would not have existed otherwise, and what changed because of them. We would rather show you three real artifacts than a dashboard of activity.
Second, what it does to the culture. One proven way to read that is the Gallup Q12, a twelve-question measure of how engaged a team really is, used across thousands of organizations. HC Innovate is built to move particular items on it:
What are all twelve? →
A team that can bring an idea and watch it get built is a team that experiences those things as true. Movement on those items, among the people near this work, is the quiet measure that matters most.
This is held lightly, on purpose. It is a first picture of what could be, offered by someone still learning the institution and with a great deal to learn from this room. None of it is fixed.
A few things would be worth deciding together. Where it sits: HC Innovate would need a seat at the cabinet table and a sponsor there, reporting in for now through the COO and Chief of Staff, with room to grow into a dedicated role as it earns it. Who leads it: a person with theological grounding, operational discipline, fluency in the tools, and trust across departments. More gardener than expert. How fast we want to move.
Three ways to pull on this
Sit with it. Decide together whether this is worth more attention before anything else moves.
Pick a single idea and let a small team build it, just to feel what this is in practice.
Tell us what you would want it to serve first. The best version of this is the one you help aim.
One question matters more than approval: is this worth building together?
Read the full strategic overview →Gallup's Q12 distills decades of research into twelve things that, when true for a team, predict engagement, retention, and performance. The themes, in plain terms:
Summarized in plain language; the exact survey wording is Gallup's. Learn more at Gallup’s Q12 page.