WASHINGTON, D.C. — At a time when the Obama administration is calling for America to “out-educate” and “out-innovate” the rest of the world, leaders of the country’s colleges and universities were encouraged Tuesday to embrace a concept known as “disruptive innovation” in order to spur productivity and increase quality in the face of tight financial resources.

The concept was touted at a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning  policy and advocacy organization. The Center also released a paper on the subject, “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education.”

The paper defines the concept as “the process by which a sector that has previously served only a limited few because its products and services were complicated, expensive, and inaccessible, is transformed into one whose products and services are simple, affordable, and convenient and serves many no matter their wealth or expertise.”

One higher education example of “disruptive innovation” is online learning, which has grown nearly three-fold from 2003 to 2009 in its postsecondary presence and is expected to reach at least 50 percent of all students by 2014, one of the panelists said.

“This exciting growth is an opportunity for us to rethink many of our age-old assumptions about higher education and how it works,” said Michael B. Horn, a co-author of the paper. Horn is also the co-founder and executive director of Education of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank that espouses the use of disruptive innovation to solve problems in society.

But online technology must not just be embraced as a tool that brings about greater efficiency and enables more access, but that also improves quality, panelists said.

“Institutions have focused on access, but changing circumstances mandate that we shift the focus of higher education policy away from merely enabling more students to afford higher education, to how to make quality higher education systems affordable to all students and society,” Horn said. “It dictates a new definition of quality from the perspective of students, so (that education) is valuable to them and through it they can improve their own lives.”