Thought on edupreneurs
In recent years edupreneurs have joined the education space
and corporate development crowd, where we had already strong presence from
pedagogical folks (instructional design), big and small IT firms (learning management
systems), governments (21st century skills), and a fragmented space
of training firms (ranging from mom & pop shops to big consulting firms and
business schools).
The edupreneurs take the valley’s approach to education and
corporate training which they deem totally broken (with the possible exception
of delivering content) or at least inefficient and learner-unfriendly. They
typically have a sharp focus and want to solve one thing, rather than take on the
holistic and complex development challenge. We visited for example a company
called Everwise that specializes in an online mentoring platform and refines
its mentoring process. Another company called Sounding Board integrates
coaching in the slack platform. CultureAmp focuses on people analytics for
engagement.
Image: an edupreneur targeting learners directly
Edupreneurs want to ‘fix a challenge’, and mostly either
work on improving efficiency (because the current stuff not efficient), work on
usability (because learners find it too hard to use), on democratization (to
provide access to learning at low thresholds), on personalization (to adjust
learning to your needs and approach). They focus on the learner directly rather
than on intermediaries such as HR organizations or institutions. The expensive
word for that is ‘disintermediation’ – a proven disruptive technique in other
industries where you cut out the middle man. For their business models most of
them look at subscription based services accessed to a platform where they own
the data.
Edupreneurs look at other fields outside of education to
address the challenges with development. They look for example at how health
care achieves behaviour change, and how platforms like Amazon influence trough
social analytics ‘people like you choose to work on …’ . Question: why do
people keep going to the gym? Answer: because of a personal trainer. Once you
figure that out, how does that transfer to the world of development?
Thought on: what if you are not a startup?
That’s all very well, but most of us don’t work for a
startup. Whether we like to or fear it may be irrelevant, we just don’t. So
what are some of the lessons of more traditional companies, or the companies
that outgrew the startup phase?
We visited Cisco Learning and Accenture Labs to learn from
their approaches. Disruption and innovation focus in established companies is a
whole different ballgame. The success factors at Accenture labs include a
strong support from the top or the organization, a fitting distributed structure
of labs around the world each with their own specialization, a funding that is
coming for 1/3 from clients, money, and a clear vision of going digital. Other
companies like my former employer IBM also have a track record of being able to
reinvent themselves. There is a lot of focus on company culture at the moment,
and innovation leadership (aka the mindset and skillset of your entire
management population) to accomplish that.
One of the crucial parts to get in place is how to deal with
failure. While running the daily business we typically try to minimize or
eliminate failure. While innovating for the future of tomorrow we need to
celebrate failure – if it is limited and we learn from it. It is after all one
of the most important lessons of the scientific method – if you cannot fail,
you cannot learn. I was most inspired by the ‘wall of failure’ in one of the
startups we visited. Even the CEO writes his small and bigger failures on the
wall for all to learn from.
Image: Accenture Labs principles
Continued in Part III
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