Social and university changes in the last years caused various changes and innovations in universities, affecting the different hierarchical levels. In this communication we present a study on six innovations performed in three Catalan universities. The general objective of the research is to feature relationships and dynamics that intervene in the change and innovation processes in higher education institutions, taking into account its organizational culture. The research poses the following questions: What are the university change processes like? Which power structures are affected? If the universities, the organizational units and the groups have different cultures, should they follow the same way to change? Of which aspects of its culture depends success in each change process? To answer these questions six university innovations in Catalonia (Spain) were studied. The innovations had different features, concerning scope -quantity of people involved-, nature -organizational or curricular-, and term -short, medium or long-. Scope, nature and term are descriptive elements of every university innovation and its combinatorial may give place to types of innovation more or less tangible that affect different dimensions of it. A model of analysis was elaborated concerning the different explanatory variables as: origin, leadership, phases and strategies, values, resistance and obstacles, impact and financing of each innovation. The objectives of the research were to study and compare features of the studied innovations, to identify the involved persons’ perceptions and to analyze different type innovations to contribute to the comprehension about change in the university.

To reach these objectives a process of theoretical sampling, or general conceptual scheme was used. The instruments used were focus interview, focus group and document analysis. The former two instruments were used to obtain information about the different agents of innovation: leaders, implementers and recipients. Use of focus group together with the interview guarantees the synchronic reliability, as it implies verification and uniformity of results regarding the same object of study intensively applying different instruments.

Results obtained point out that the six innovations studied present very diverse traits concerning the combinatorial of its features (organizational culture, scope, nature and term of the change), being these features related with a set of key variables in innovations’ study as: origin, values that support it, leadership, phases and strategies, resistances and obstacles of it, impact and financing. Regarding this, according to term, innovations differed in type of leadership required, values and resistances. Type of leadership, strategies, impact and financing also vary considering scope of innovation. Concerning nature, it is, according innovations are curricular or organizational, they originate by different motives. Although results are not directly able to generalize due to the reduced number of cases and the complexity of the object of study, this model of analysis allowed us to feature the studied changes, and to analyze deeply an important set of variables implied in every innovation.