We have laid out some bold aspirations for the University of Waterloo’s future. We have a lot of work ahead over the next 35 years, but every journey starts with one step.
Our immediate goals to get us started:
Evolving our values
To support the change we need to realize this vision of Waterloo at 100, we will start by revisiting our values to catalyze a culture shift to work more nimbly and collaboratively. This will also include addressing the President’s Anti-Racism Taskforce’s recommendation to revise our institutional values to apply lenses of anti-racism and anti-oppression. For progress on this initiative, please visit Values Initiative.
Aligning to our Global Futures
We will collaborate and organize our activities in education, research and service more effectively around the areas of impact we seek to make. We will reimagine interdisciplinary research and academic activity, identifying strategies and collaborative energies towards realizing the Futures.
A pillar for social and policy engagement
To create the impacts we desire in our Global Futures we must build up our capacity for social and policy engagement that is more integrated with scientific innovation and technology. The evolution of our differentiators depends on being more socially engaged, robust and relevant. A range of efforts will be planned for in education, research and knowledge mobilization to drive this new emphasis at Waterloo.
A place for ideas
As we evolve our institutional culture with an emphasis on collaboration and coordination, the Waterloo at 100 Incubator will help translate big and small ideas from the university and surrounding community to make this vision reality. Many such ideas will respond to impacts desired within and at the intersections of the Global Futures. Others will relate to organizational effectiveness to evolve how we get things done. Some will create ideas for working with local and global communities in new ways. Waterloo will back the bold ideas that project us into the future.
Our planning and performance
To keep us on track we will set ourselves short-term priorities against this long-term vision. Many of the initiatives from our current strategic plan will be continued against Waterloo at 100 goals. New performance indicators will be set, aligned to our vision. Annual integrated planning and rolling multi-year budgeting will enable us to be more agile and collaborative across portfolios. This step towards more transparent and integrated planning will be a key enabler to everything else in Waterloo at 100.
