As universities across the US experience unprecedented cuts in government funding, the time for bold strategic adaptation is now. Arizona State University (ASU) offers one of the most compelling living examples of what’s possible—not through austerity or incremental efficiency, but through a reinvention of the university’s very purpose and structure.

In just over two decades, ASU transformed from an overlooked regional school into what U.S. News & World Report now heralds as the "most innovative university in America"—ranking ahead of Stanford and MIT for the past 10 years. Under Dr. Michael Crow, ASU at the same time expanded enrollment and access, improved outcomes for low-income and first-generation students, increased research funding fivefold, and redefined the mission of a public university. These outcomes are not the product of conventional management. They are the result of Crow applying a different intellectual tradition—a mode of reasoning not grounded in analysis of what is, but in building what ought to be.

Let’s go to the root of this distinction. From the beginning of Western thought, thinkers have distinguished between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: epistēmē and technē. Epistēmē concerns itself with what is, while technē begins from what ought to be. This distinction, first drawn by Aristotle, provides the philosophical basis for differentiating between the scientific method on the one hand and what today we call Design Science. Though the two share techniques—like hypothesizing, testing, and iteration—they are opposite in orientation. We go back to the Greeks, not for academic nostalgia, but because understanding the origins of this distinction between the scientific method and Design Science helps us more intuitively understand that Crow did not "manage" ASU, he redesigned it from first principles—in the tradition of technē, not epistēmē.

The scientific method, which arises from epistēmē, begins with observation of existing phenomena and proceeds to explanation. At its core, epistēmē seeks to discover necessary truths through logical demonstration and empirical verification. Its modern formulation evolved from Aristotle's idea of demonstrable knowledge, through Descartes and Bacon's experimental method, to Newtonian laws and Popper's notion of falsifiability. In each case, the thinker sought to uncover what is true about the world and explain why it is so. The scientific method has proven extraordinarily powerful in the natural and social sciences, precisely because it is focused on discovering and explaining what already exists. The scientific method is rooted in epistēmē because it begins with the world as it is and seeks to explain it.

If Crow had applied the scientific method alone to reform ASU, he might have begun by observing the university's underperformance, hypothesizing the causes, and then testing incremental solutions. He might have commissioned white papers, reorganized departments slightly, launched pilot programs with limited scope, or benchmarked ASU against peer institutions to “catch up.” This would have been managerial reform by epistēmē—diagnosing and adjusting, not redesigning. Crow did something different.

Design Science, which arises from technē, begins with a desired outcome and works backward to build what is needed to achieve that outcome. Technē, as Aristotle first described it, is a kind of knowledge oriented toward making—toward producing things that do not yet exist. It is the logic not of discovery but of creation. Technē wound its way from the Greeks to Vitruvius's systematic architecture, flowed through the Enlightenment's rationalization of craft and labor and onwards into the 20th-century revival of design as a form of reason by thinkers like John Dewey and Herbert Simon. What distinguishes technē is that it does not seek truth in the abstract, but seeks utility in context: what can we make that works? Technē gives us a way of thinking that begins with what should be and moves backward to design what must therefore necssarily be.

The evolution of technē in the modern world reaches a decisive moment with the work of Herbert A. Simon, whose 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial provided the philosophical foundation for treating design as a scientific discipline. Simon argued that everyone who seeks to change an existing situation into a preferred one is engaged in design. He formalized ideas such as bounded rationality, satisficing, and iterative feedback, and treated complex problem-solving as a structured cognitive activity. Simon did not give us a recipe, but he gave us the intellectual permission to think of design as a form of rigorous reasoning. With Simon, technē re-entered the modern canon as a serious, teachable discipline.

The structured methodology Simon implied was later formalized by Steven T. March and Gerald F. Smith in their 1995 paper "Design and Natural Science Research on Information Technology," and by Alan R. Hevner et al. in their 2004 paper "Design Science in Information Systems Research." These thinkers articulated what we now call Design Science. Their contribution was not to add new theory, but to distill Simon's insights into a usable sequence of steps. These steps are (1) define the problem; (2) build an artifact (a model, method, or system) by specifying its components and defining the relationships between them; (3) test the artifact in context and (4) iterate based on results. March, Smith, and Hevner gave technē a replicable process that could be applied in any domain, not just technology.

Crow applied this process to ASU's institutional design, its education and its research. Crow made what one often sees in great innovations - a preceding conceptual leap — he reimagined the university not as a public bureaucracy or a prestige-driven academy, but as a knowledge business. Practitioner’s note: the time for these leaps when engaged in strategic adaptation is before you redefine your mission. Your vision is the world you and your hard-working colleagues hope to see. In contrast, your mission is the contribution you and your colleagues will make to achieving that vision. There is often an impatience in the strategic planning process to rush ahead to the subsequent phases of creating objectives and strategies that misleadingly feel more substantive and tangible. It is merely the comfort of the familiar. Your mission was your key fork-in-the-road moment. Choose poorly and there be dragons, or at least not much treasure. Your mission is so important in fact, that you should pressure-test your draft by asking if anyone would do the opposite. If no one would, the mission is not stated at the correct level of granularity, lacks traction and is practically useless because it doesn't make a real choice. In Crow’s new mission, ASU would not succeed by hoarding academic knowledge in siloes and charging for access, but by co-investing its knowledge in solving real-world problems and using the rewards to expand enrollment. Crow coined this mission - “The New American University.” This practical orientation became both a cultural identity and a financial model - solve real-world problems, and the resources will follow. Crow’s creative conceptual leap put ASU into motion as a dynamic problem-solving institution—a public sector analogue of the modern R&D engine, despite (or perhaps because of) significant state funding cuts.

As one might reasonably expect, Crow encountered internal resistance to this new mission. “ASU was operated as if it were a conservative state agency,” Crow has explained. “People did not view it as a malleable institution with the ability to define and create its own future. The ASU I envisioned would require innovators, collaborators, and risk-takers. It was a complete shift, and one that some people would not be willing to make.” Arizona State University, Scaling the New American Research University, Harvard Education Press, Case KC23ARIZ, at 4. Skeptical colleagues resisted Crow’s language of design and enterprise, and many viewed his charter as at best vague, at worst mere marketing. Rather than engaging in ideological battles, Crow created structures that allowed the new direction to proceed regardless of detractors. He allowed some time for change to take root, while refusing to wait for universal consensus before moving forward. He offered repeated opportunities to participate in the transformation while allowing change to unfold around existing resistance. Rather than dismantling existing units overnight, he launched new schools and centers aligned with the mission, allowing them to gain momentum and legitimacy on their own, changing the context and allowing new structures and ideas to justify themselves.

1. Defined what ought to be: At the outset, Crow rejected the choice between prestige (Crow referred to this as the “Harvardization” of the university) and accessibility and stated what he thought ought to be - a university that simultaneously maximized access, research excellence and societal impact. This triad became ASU’s “design constraint” for all future changes and was subsequently reflected in the updated 2014 university mission.

2. Redesigned the academic structure: Crow repeatedly broke up siloed departments and reorganized them into transdisciplinary problem-solving institutes. (1) The School of Life Sciences combined 3 relatively mediocre departments of biology, microbiology, and plant biology into one transdisciplinary school involving relatively low institutional investment. (2) The Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering was reformatted to bring together engineering disciplines ranging from biomedical and health to informatics and sustainability. (3) The Biodesign Institute focused on convergent technologies and research in the fields of biomedicine, health outcomes and security; (4) The School of Sustainability similarly combined research units from multiple disciplines. Crow supplemented this with strategic acquisitions, such as the Thunderbird School of Global Management in 2014.

3. Built new delivery mechanisms: In 2009, ASU launched its first online offerings with the goal of serving 20,000 online students by 2020. By 2014, ASU had already served 14,000 students on the platform. The next year, ASU announced a partnership with Starbucks that allowed 135,000 qualifying Starbucks employees across the US to obtain tuition reimbursement and complete post-secondary education online with ASU. In 2008, Crow even went into PreK-12 education with the launch of ASU Preparatory Academies, a network of charter schools. Six years later, eight PreK-12 schools served 2,000 students within ASU’s downtown campus in Phoenix.

4. Formed mission-aligned partnerships: Crow expanded ASU’s corporate partnerships, that previously included General Electric and Motorola, to Starbucks, Amazon and Adidas. In 2016, Crow brokered a partnership with Mayo Clinic (leading to the Mayo Clinic and ASU Alliance for Health Care) and with community colleges across Arizona to streamline transfer pathways. In February 2024, ASU's Board of Regents approved the creation of the medical school, with plans to admit its first students in fall 2026.

5. Implemented outcome-based metrics: Crow shifted ASU’s performance indicators from traditional prestige output metrics to practical outcomes: (a) first-generation student enrollment, (b) Pell Grant eligibility, (c) retention, (d) graduation rates, and (e) research impact in areas like sustainability and public health.

6. Grew enrollment 257% while enduring budget cuts: Prior to the 2008 recession, Arizona funded its public universities and community colleges to the tune of $1 billion. In 2016 this dropped to less than $600 million. In 2009, ASU saw its state funding cut by $110 million. In 2016 by $53 million. Crow responded not by retreating but by accelerating transformation—expanding online offerings, increasing research productivity, and reducing administrative overhead while maintaining growth. Total enrollment at ASU was 49,242 in 1997. In 2001, the year before Crow took the lead, it was 52,759.(Arizona State University 2002 Financial Report, at page 7). As of today, March 2025, ASU enrollment has grown 257% since 2001, and is now at over 183,000 students, with 142,000 undergraduates and over 41,000 postgraduates. 74,000 are enrolled online. Arizona State University, Facts and Figures.

7. Institutionalized design and iteration: Crow created leadership structures that reinforced the university’s adaptive capacity—embedding innovation in deans' mandates, aligning incentive structures with public value, and building platforms like the University Design Institute to share and iterate the ASU model.

Seen through the lens of design science methodology, Crow's actions map precisely onto the structure proposed by March, Smith, and Hevner. He (a) clearly defined the problem (existing models of higher education were either exclusive and elite or inclusive and underperforming); (b) built artifacts (a new charter, new organizational structures, new partnerships, and delivery systems); (c) tested these through real-world implementation, measuring not prestige but performance and (d) iterated based on what worked, refining both internal operations and external relationships. In short, Crow followed the design science method step by step.

Even more profoundly, Crow redirected the intellectual work of the university itself from outputs to outcomes, towards "use-inspired research,” focusing investments in sustainability, renewable energy, public health, and urban planning. From 2002 to 2024, ASU increased its research expenditures from under $150 million to $904 million per year, making it one of the fastest-growing knowledge enterprises in the country. In this way, Crow not only practiced technē in how he and his colleagues redesigned the university, but in how the university worked and what it worked on.

Design Science is not a softer cousin of the scientific method—it is a different way of reasoning entirely, grounded in the tradition of technē and oriented toward changing the world rather than explaining it. Michael Crow did not analyze ASU; he redesigned it. And in doing so, he gave us not a model to admire, but a paradigm to re-apply.

Patrick Landers is VP of Strategy at Convene Lab, a strategy consultancy focused on strategic practice. Click here for a quick chat.