Professor will lead three-year project on how credit unions can innovate

The Filene Research Institute named Rutgers Business School Professor Jeffrey Robinson as research fellow of its newly launched Center for Excellence for Innovation and Incubation.

The institute is a credit union and consumer finance think tank headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dr. Robinson will lead a three-year project to study how credit unions can respond to members’ desire for greater financial services innovations that meet their needs and their communities’ needs while also exploring the general state of innovation across the credit union system. Ultimately, this research aims to help credit unions build systems, cultures and processes so that they may remain adaptive to changing needs of members and communities long into the future.

Consumer behaviors and preferences were changing at a rapid pace pre-pandemic, and now that change is only accelerating, according to the institute. With one in five credit union members reporting that they would consider switching to a more innovative financial institution, the institute said, credit unions can’t afford to ignore this growing consumer demand.

Robinson is an associate professor of management and global business who teaches entrepreneurship to undergraduate ("Social Entrepreneurship"), MBA ("Managing Growing Ventures") and Executive MBA students at Rutgers. He is also academic director of The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development and has spent more than 20 years researching innovation and entrepreneurship. During that time, he has consulted with more than 2,000 startups and numerous corporations seeking a competitive edge.

“This is my life’s work, what I’ve been doing, and what I want to do. I am interested in supporting an industry I admire – I got my first car loan from a credit union and I am a member of a credit union now,” Robinson said. “As a researcher, I am interested in this work because I want to better understand and reveal deeper insights on how an industry like credit unions is reacting to social, technological and economic challenges, what kinds of business models are changing, how they are changing, who is changing them, and what kinds of innovations are coming out of these changes.”

“Cooperative finance is not just a business model, it’s a movement—and I like to be involved in movements that matter,” he said.

To support credit union growth, the Center of Excellence for Innovation and Incubation will take an action-oriented applied research approach to studying products, services and operations that can improve the credit union system’s innovation capabilities and capacities.

“Filene’s innovation and incubation initiatives support our broader mission to help credit unions and communities thrive,” said Filene’s Senior Director of Incubation Josh Sledge. “We do this by seeking new ideas, running test pilots, and scaling promising concepts. The Center of Excellence for Innovation and Incubation will help fuel that mission.”

Generous support for the Center of Excellence for Innovation and Incubation is provided by American Airlines Federal Credit Union, BECU, Christian Financial Credit Union, Coastal Credit Union, and Corporate Central Credit Union.

“Credit unions have an opportunity to differentiate among financial services providers through business model innovation and entrepreneurial thinking,” said Corporate Central Credit Union’s President and CEO Chris Felton. “Combining credit unions’ status as trusted community partners with Filene’s research on innovation and incubation gives the industry a competitive advantage and Corporate Central is excited to support the advancement of this innovation initiative.”

The launch of the Center of Excellence rounds out Filene’s research agenda with six focus areas. In addition to Innovation and Incubation, Centers for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Consumer Financial Lives in Transition, Emerging Technology, Data Analytics, and Community Social Impact launched in 2020.