Academic innovation is widely invoked in higher education, yet narrowly imagined in practice, associated with specific titles, well-resourced institutions, and emerging technologies. This experience paper argues that academic innovation is cultural practice enacted across roles and sectors, often without formal recognition. Drawing on a three-year developmental arc (2023–2026) of the Academic Innovation Alliance (AIA), a cross-sector community of practice convened by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Opened Culture, with D2L sponsorship since 2025, the paper presents a design sprint model for collaborative innovation work. Across in-person and virtual convenings engaging more than 160 participants in co-definition, failure and friction clinics, sprint prototyping, and alliance architecture sessions, three findings emerged: innovation identity extends beyond titled roles, structured design sprints accelerate shared practice, and culture functions as the determining infrastructure for sustained innovation. The paper offers a replicable model grounded in design thinking and communities of practice theory, with implications for distance education leaders building cross-institutional innovation capacity under constraint.