Incentivizing academic collaboration within responsibility center managed institutions

Responsibility Center Management (RCM) has received considerable attention in the last two to three decades as universities become increasingly complex organizations. The impact of RCM on a campus strategy and organization is meaningful, especially as more institutions promote academic collaboration. As it is implemented or considered on many campuses, the merits of this newer finance model are still not empirically proven and detractors claim that it does more harm than good. This study examines the characteristics of RCM that could potentially create obstacles to the implementation of a strategy within an institution and specifically looks to document methods used at three successful private universities to incentivize interdisciplinary collaboration and mitigate atomization of the academic units.