by Meghan Desai  on Tue 21 Feb - 0 Comments
Categories: Education

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Innovations come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small and incremental while others change the incumbent way of doing things in radical ways. Incremental innovations help narrow the chasm along the adoption curve for more radical innovations, but radical innovations may be able to jump over the chasms on their own. But, are there scenarios where one ‘level’ of innovation is more appropriate than another? Are there industries whose structure and characteristic at a given period of time explicitly favor one over the other?

In the education technology industry, a plethora of solutions from digital content to education specific computing hardware have emerged over the past few decades, yet most of these solutions have gotten trapped into specialized computer labs. In order for a technology based solution to be successful in the classroom (specifically K-12) it must be able to replace paper and ink while being as seamless and easy to use as paper and ink. Neither students nor teachers should have to invest time thinking about the technology or getting it to work properly; their energies should be focused on the classroom lesson.

The industry, thus, seems ripe for a radical innovation in the form of an Apple-like well thought through solution that addresses the above. However, such a solution may face significant barriers and be deemed a failure in the short term by the industry. Indeed, Apple managed to be successful with its arguably radical innovations (iPod, iTunes, iPhone), but Apple’s customers weren’t institutions but rather individuals. In the case of a McGraw-Hill or Pearson, who traditionally sell textbooks to schools, would such a radical foray into digital content be lucrative or career-ending disaster for a budding executive?

Indeed, the behavioral, infrastructure and even technological barriers to adoption of innovations in this industry are arguably high:

• Behavioral. There is a high degree of behavioral change required from teachers (and students) that will be using technology for education. This barrier is compounded by a general technophobia amongst teachers, stemming from fears of a new way of doing things and of technology breaking down at inopportune times, among others.
• Infrastructure. Mainstream adoption in the US requires adoption by public schools where any investment is an investment of public resources and thus subject to public scrutiny. Given that efficacy of technology in classrooms still needs to be proven, school administrators will find it difficult to justify large-scale investments in ed tech, particularly around replacing the primary 
• source of content (textbooks).
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• Technological. Despite a general feeling that technology will be good for education, compelling use cases for in-classroom usage remain to be perfected. Can technology, in its present state, even fully deliver on these use cases. (Ex. 802.11 is not reliable enough to maintain a 30+ client connection to a single router through a full class period. In fact, it was designed to “kick clients off” when things get too hectic.)

For example, Intel’s attempt at solving the hardware challenges with its Intel-powered Classmate PC category of devices, an arguably radical innovation in the education technology space, faces the above barriers to widespread adoption in the US. Teachers fearful of even minimal technology in the classroom strongly resist the 1-to-1 (1 computer per student) model. Lacking efficacy data, administrators find it difficult to justify the purchase especially given the seemingly high TCO of computers.

With education technology, companies need to change teacher’s perceptions while developing the critical use cases for the classroom. These use cases must be able to deliver efficacy results that facilitate school administrator’s decisions to invest in that technology. Innovation behind these uses cases must be an iterative process that involves the teachers and administrators. This will prime the industry to adopt their more radical (compared to before the incremental innovations) innovations.

In the face of strong institutional barriers to adoption, where the chasm to wide-spread adoption seems too wide, companies should focus on a strategy of incremental innovation to narrow that chasm.

Meghan Desai is an MBA candidate at the Harvard Business School. Prior to school, he was a business development manager at Intel Corporation focused on delivering education-specific technology solution via sustainable (profit-chain) business models. He created the strategy for Intel to partner with textbook publishing companies (ex. McGraw-Hill) in developing and bringing purely technology-based textbooks to market. Most recently, Meghan spent the past summer working at Amazon on the Kindle for Android reading app. Meghan has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.

This post originally appeared on Professor Karim Lakhani's Managing Innovation course blog: http://blog.hbs.edu/hbsinov8/. You can follow #hinnov8 on Twitter to join the class conversation.