Structural challenges and cross-institutional collaboration

If you look for research on innovation, you will find that much of the literature is in the field of business.  Innovation, of course, is key to business success and is often rewarded with profit and wealth.

One of the challenges in discussing innovations in law school is that much of this literature does not apply.  In business, innovation often comes from people starting a new business.  They are the ones who provide the new ideas, whether it is a product, marketing idea, or service.  In the legal academy, we don't have that option-- we can't very easily peel off to start our own school.  Thus, those individuals who do innovate must do it within institutional structures that sometimes creates disincentives to innovation-- for example, through a tenure process that rewards fitting in. 

Still, we have new innovators in teaching, scholarship, administration, and curriculum development.   Much of that innovation grows out of collaboration between diverse individuals, which allows ideas and personalities to meld and become something new. 

In the last several years, the amount of collaboration between scholars at different schools has greatly increased.   As this blog illustrates, the internet has made new types of inter-school collaboration possible.  The fact that we lack the ability to form new units (as business innovators do) make this development all the more important. 

One thing I wonder, though, is whether this collaboration needs to be limited to scholarship?  Is there a way to develop, through the use of the internet and other technologies, collaborative teaching across institutional lines?  Specifically, would it be possible to teach the same class in two places?  At the very least, it seems like it should be possible to share not just a syllabus, but teaching and testing materials for groundbreaking types of classes. 

Has anyone come close to cross-institutional teaching?

-- Mark Osler