Many institutional cultures resist change, and academic developers take different approaches to overcoming such resistance, depending on the nature of the change and the institution, and their own characteristic styles and working preferences.
Variables influencing the successful introduction of innovation in academic practice include the inherent susceptibility of the institution to innovation, the nature of the innovation and the approaches of the change agents involved. This paper explores responses to resistant institutional culture; it presents a dichotomous model of educational development orientations, which emerged from an action research project within a research intensive university, and suggests that by adapting developmental orientations according to the context, developers can explicitly influence the responsiveness of the institution to innovation in academic practice.