Dr Jennifer Roberts

Professional biography

Dr Jennifer Harper is one of the Faculty Strategic Implementation Leads, and a Lecturer at the Open University for the Faculty of Business and Law. In addition to holding a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, her research focus examines development and training, technology and artificial intelligence, and enhancing the learning experience. She is actively involved with different HE institutions in the development and training of leaders in the FE, HE and business sectors. 

Her scholarship and research centre on technology, innovation, and leadership in higher education, with a particular emphasis on how these strategic capabilities shape institutional performance and student experience. She examines how digital technologies, such as learning platforms, analytics, and emerging AI-enabled systems are mobilised through leadership and management practice to drive meaningful innovation rather than surface-level digitalisation. Drawing on strategic management and leadership theory, she conceptualises leadership as a capability-building process that aligns technological investment, organisational culture, and pedagogical practice, enabling institutions to adapt to complexity and change. A key strand of her research investigates how innovation is enacted across pedagogical, organisational, and cultural domains, and how management systems, incentives, and governance structures either support or constrain these processes. Through this work, she advances scholarly understanding of strategic leadership and innovation in higher education while informing academic practice and graduate-level teaching on how technology-enabled change can be human-centered, inclusive, and sustainable.