Strategy

In this chapter, we explore the nature of strategy. We have touched upon the subject in earlier chapters but here we present a typology of strategies. We define strategy as a route consisting of a set of deliberate actions leading to realizing your sustainable value proposition. Strategy can be approached as a plan or a process. Six strategies are distinguished: (1) eco-efficiency, (2) product as a service, (3) use optimization, (4) lifespan extension, (5) cascading, and (6) community building. Each of these strategies can be used as a stand-alone strategy or in a balanced combination while developing one of the business model archetypes. Which of these strategies or combinations you choose depends on the specific circumstances and stakeholders involved and the context in which you are seeking to realize your business model, as well as the underlying value proposition. A functional strategy is fundamentally a matter of clear, reasoned and actionable choices.


Strategic Aims and Objectives
To integrate the University of Hull's Vision into the student experience • Motivated by society's challenges and inspired by the power of our global community, we're shaping a fairer, brighter, carbon-neutral future. This Vision will be experienced by all students and staff at the University of Hull.
We'll do this by: • Integrating all elements of our Vision, explicitly and regularly, throughout the student experience in ways appropriate to each discipline, from Open Day to graduation and beyond • Creating new, innovative interdisciplinary courses, which allow students to test the extent of, and stretch the scope of, the elements of the Vision • Providing common extra-and co-curricular experiences to support all students to understand the breadth of the Vision • Celebrating our areas of educational excellence in carbon-neutrality and climate change, sustainability, societal and health inequalities and social justice

To create a truly inclusive University
Inclusivity is at the heart of the University of Hull's values. An inclusive approach celebrates diversity and embraces differences throughout all areas of university life. Inclusivity at the University of Hull not only places students at the heart of this transformational change, but actively empowers students as partners.
We'll do this by: • Adopting a collaborative approach to bring together academic staff, student support teams, professional services and estates to drive progressive, sector-leading change • Calling out, challenging and changing discriminatory attitudes • Encouraging civic participation, employment, and community life both during and beyond university • Adopting an anticipatory approach that not only seeks to identify and remove existing barriers, but endeavours to shape best practice across the wider Higher Education sector • Continually reviewing learning, teaching and assessment strategies, awarding gaps, and student retention to ensure equality irrespective of background

To meet the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution
In 2018, the World Economic Forum described the fourth industrial revolution as "a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technological advances which are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril. The speed, breadth and depth of this revolution is forcing us to rethink how countries develop, and organisations create value and even what it means to be human." We use the terms 'digital' and 'fourth industrial revolution' as proxies for preparing our graduates for an unknown future in which the role of the individual in communities is fundamentally changing.
We'll do this by: • Encompassing enquiry into human connections, connectedness, cultures, values and behaviours across our courses in ways appropriate to each discipline • Recognising within our programmes that the integration of the physical, digital and biological worlds is causing a blurring of reality as we've known it • Leading a paradigm shift in the higher education experience from the accepted, traditional educational norms of knowledge acquisition to competencies • Investing in new digital capabilities for staff and students

To deliver excellent teaching
In 2019, we started an initiative to 'Transform Programmes'. This is a scholarly-led project that will take until 2023 to realise across campus and 2025 with our collaborative partners. This initiative will ensure programmes continue to be current, coherent, rigorous and academically excellent. Our programmes should inspire our students and be at the heart of the student experience. The initiative is supported by the Teaching Excellence Academy (TEA) whose purpose is to celebrate, develop and promote excellent teaching.
We'll do this by: • Encouraging innovation by creating a positive change culture, where evidence-informed risks are encouraged, evaluated and rewarded • Adopting authentic and inclusive assessment practices within the framework of professional, statutory and regulatory requirements as appropriate • Providing our students with prompt, meaningful feedback that explains the grade achieved, and provides constructive advice and support on future development. When student attainment falls short of expectation, we'll support them in their efforts to improve.
• Supporting students with the opportunity to develop knowledge exchange and enterprise skills in our undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, and offering extracurricular opportunities to develop the application of these skills • Refreshing our policies and practices so they're clear, accessible and consistent, and they support student progression and achievement, as well as efficient curriculum development and monitoring • Moving swiftly to develop an ambitious but achievable digital/technology-enhanced Learning and Teaching Strategy. This will enhance the digital skills of our staff to support blended and fully online learning within an inclusive learning and teaching portfolio, which supports supports the needs of a diverse student body • Embedding the principles of our work-based learning framework across the curriculum • Ensuring opportunities for career progression and fostering educational leadership • Completing a thorough assessment and review of our postgraduate taught provision during 2020, and ensuring we offer a desirable, contemporary portfolio of courses aligned to employer needs • Supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning to achieve teaching excellence, and sharing good practice through a comprehensive portfolio of developmental activity, as well as TEA celebration and dissemination events

To create a vibrant research-informed teaching and learning environment
Excellent teaching goes hand-in-hand with excellent research. Research-informed teaching benefits the student experience, supports student employability, and gives students the opportunity to participate and contribute through experiential learning, and work as researchers on real-world projects. It can also inspire students and create a sense of belonging to an institutional or disciplinary research culture, and it develops intellectual curiosity as well as research and communication skills.
We'll do this by: • Embedding research experiences for learners into and across curricula • Integrating the University of Hull's research into the curriculum • Enhancing the student journey and help raise student aspiration by making connections between disciplinary research and the curriculum explicit • Ensuring learning and teaching activities are fully informed by pedagogic research and the scholarship of teaching and learning

To provide sector-leading academic support
The University experience is life changing and exciting, but it can also be daunting. High quality academic support beyond the taught curriculum plays a vital role in student retention, success and satisfaction. Excellent academic support is designed to facilitate the student through their learning journey. It supports and enhances student motivation and creates a sense of belonging.
We'll do this by: • Recognising the delivery of education for a fairer and brighter future includes support for student wellbeing • Making sure every undergraduate student has a personal tutor, and every postgraduate taught student has a supervisor, who provides individual and personalised pastoral and academic support

• Ensuring all communication with students is in clear and accessible language
• Breaking down University systems that lead to silo working • Creating efficiency and connectedness in the systems that support our students • Developing systems to ensure we use data to enhance each student's experience in respect of their engagement, attendance, support, retention and success • Providing resources and guidance for all students, personal tutors and supervisors to clarify roles and expectations, and to enable signposting to specialist further support where appropriate • Supporting students to make full use of our extensive additional and specialist support systems and initiatives

To adopt a competence-based approach to higher education
University of Hull graduates move on to further study, employment, enterprise, and voluntary service. These graduate futures are fast changing. We'll build curricula that will equip our graduates with the necessary skills to navigate uncertainty with confidence, critically interrogate and assess the validity of information with integrity and rigour, and act independently and responsibly with a mind to ethical, global citizenship.
We'll do this by: • Ensuring the enduring currency of our students' 'graduateness' through the delivery of competence-based programmes • Providing for competences based on: o Knowledge Management, including sourcing, understanding, creating and communicating knowledge o Disciplinary and Professional Experience, using dialectic action and critical thought to address a real-world task/practice in context, working independently or as part of a team o Self-Awareness, which encompasses self-assessment and self-regulation in public and private domains, independently or through team working • Paying constant attention to our academic and professional development, finding a more fluid way of working to sustain the currency of our educational portfolio and responding assertively to the UK Industrial Strategy (2017) • Integrating the University of Hull Graduate Attributes into the competence framework and the Employability Strategy 2020

To build strong educational communities of learning
We value collaborative learning opportunities. Our learning communities include our students, alumni, staff, partner schools and colleges, employers and placement providers. We'll put our partners at the heart of what we do. Learning communities foster talent and create opportunity, as well as a sense of identity and belonging. Our local employer, enterprise and industrial partners frequently tell us that we're the talent pipeline in the Humber and East Yorkshire area for graduate jobs. As an anchor University with strong civic commitments, we work closely with stakeholders to create fit-for-purpose under-and postgraduate level education and training. Our stakeholder engagement activities allow us to share good practice, research and exchange knowledge that shapes the future design of organisations, employment opportunities and roles. Our employer partners also look to us to help them upskill and reskill their employees, and we'll grow our higher and degree apprenticeship provision and our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) offer to meet their needs.
We'll do this by: • Welcoming collaboration and partnership • Recognising that students are agents of change for a fairer, brighter and carbonneutral future • Co-creating the curriculum with students and partners • Shifting from listening and responding to the student voice, to working with our students as partners to ensure our partnership is authentic and meaningful • Increasing well-structured and supported placement opportunities, internships and work experience opportunities for our students. This will bring benefits to their learning and employability, and to the provider by affording them access to a pipeline of talented individuals who can contribute positively to their organisation.