Many institutional cultures resist change, and within universities academic developers vary their response to such resistance, depending on the type of change, the institution and their own characteristic styles, working preferences and strategic judgements. Variables influencing the successful introduction of innovation in academic practice include the inherent susceptibility of the institution to innovation, the nature of the innovation and the approaches of the change agents involved. This paper explores responses to resistant institutional culture; it presents a dichotomous model of educational development orientations which emerged from an action research project within a research-intensive university and suggests that by adapting developmental orientations according to context, developers can explicitly influence the responsiveness of members of the institution to innovation in academic practice.