Thursday, March 10, 2022
Effects of Russia being Isolated from Global Internet
Monday, February 28, 2022
UN Warning on Climate Change in Australia
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Edtech seems to be a hot space 🔥 to invest in - over the next 10 years
Venture capitalists (vcs) have invested around $21bn into education technology companies in 2021, according to Holon iq, a research firm (see chart).l - 40 times more than a decade ago.
Seventeen ed-tech startups became “unicorns” Half a dozen of them went public. They included Coursera and Duolingo .
Holon iq has predicted that global ed-tech revenues could almost double from $227bn that year to around $400bn in 2025, a fifth higher than its pre-pandemic forecast.
Schools and universities control much of the $6trn spent globally on education each year. They tend to be cash-strapped and conservative. Edtech is only 3pc
For schools - broadband and tablets are the go and lawmakers in America have earmarked an extra $200bn or so for schools since the pandemic started.
Companies that offer after-school lessons—such as Outschool, an American unicorn, and GoStudent, an Austrian one—are growing fast
Adult learning is on the rise - with workers taking online courses that they thought would improve their prospects.
Reskilling job and switching are the go and staff training is seen to be a strong retention tool
Up-and-coming firms include Guild, which helps blue-collar workers at giants such as Walmart and Disney gain new qualifications, and Better Up, an American company that helps professionals find coaching.
Nexttech is a company worth watching
An influx of users and money in the pandemic has given more firms the muscle to expand abroad and to find ways of retaining users for longer, reckons Deborah Quazzo of gsv, a big educational investor.
Take Byju’s. It has spent at least $2.8bn on a dozen acquisitions in an apparent attempt to string together services that will allow it to reach learners of all ages, from toddlers to career-changers - offering online classes in coding and maths to children in America, Brazil, Britain, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Welcome to the Nexttech Revolution
Ed tech
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/02/19/can-the-ed-tech-boom-last
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Monday, January 3, 2022
Have you got a Pooh in your life?
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Creating innovation is as easy as N ABC
Curt Carlson who was CEO of SRI that was an organization that had been failing for 20 years.
He implemented a value creation model and turned it around creating SIRi many other innovative products . This methodology (NABC) (Needs,Approach, Benefits , Competition ) is now used by companies and governments around the world, including the U.S., Singapore, Taiwan, Sweden, Finland, Chile, and Japan.
Curt Carlson shares a whitepaper in the link below where he shares how Musk Edison, Jobs, Sarnoff, Morita and Eastman have used this methodology .
Below is a small taste
Creating an Innovative Product or business is like baking a cake
To embark on a value creation journey - is like baking a cake - you need to start with a vision of what the cake will look like - but that’s not enough .
You need a recipe, access to the relevant ingredients and then persevere to discover the actual need, solution, and business model and then stay at it for years while pulling all the parts together.
There are many ingredients - or factors that you need and have to come together, but generally, only a few essential factors determine the framework for success. You must identify them at the start and then mitigate their risks to prove the innovation is feasible.
Timing is super important
The failure to get the timing right for an innovation is another reason so many initiatives fail. It is like cooking a souffle – you must not be too early or too late. The window of opportunity is often only a few years. Jobs timed the iPhone perfectly.
Below is a “Strawman” of the Value Creation model
Value creation is a journey from the starting point on the bottom-left of the chart, where you “know nothing,” to the development of a valuable innovation.
One of these ingredients is the knowledge from both technology and from other aspects of society, including trends in demographics, government regulations, and most importantly what the customer needs and prefers .
You can never eliminate all the risks, endless issues come up, and the innovation evolves, as the zigs and zags on the chart indicate.
These are the four fundamental questions that need to be answered
- Is it a large and growing customer and market problem that impacts many?
- Have you identified the actual need, the missing enabler,
- Do you have a viable business model?
- Can all the parts be assembled when you are ready to build the product and launch it into the marketplace?
Innovating and trying to solve wicked complex problems requires an intense commitment to the value creation journey.
If you followed the value creation methodology, you will almost always mostly ended up in a good place.
What it’s not about
This form of enterprise strategy is not about writing 300-page business plans. It is not about building huge teams. And it is not about rapidly spending huge amounts of money. Instead, it is about first getting the few fundamental concepts right and then aggressively de-risking them and the other elements of the solution, testing assumptions with potential customers, and finally building the offering.
Here is a checklist of the strategic methodology described:
- Look for multiple "colliding exponentials," which often open major new white spaces.
- Identify a significant customer problem and market space.
- Identify the actual important, growing unmet customer and market need.
- Pinpoint the missing ingredient that enables the innovation's solution.
- Create a viable starting business model.
- Provide evidence that all elements will be available to build and launch the offering - Cash 💰 being a significant ingredient
- Rapidly de-risk the key insights, major risks, and other potential barriers.
- Spend very few resources until the initiative is derisked, including the offering and business model.
- Assure a compelling and sustainable competitive advantage.
- Intensely drive the value creation process and identify a beachhead to get started.
What did Musk say
Musk says he focuses first on the fundamentals. For example, he said, "Always go beyond memorizing formulas, passing tests, to always go deep into the underlying principles of a subject, to track any problem down to the root cause, buried in the dirt, in the dark." In addition, he says, "The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."
About Curtis Carlson
Curtis Raymond Carlson was president and CEO of SRI International from 1998 to 2014 and is a prominent technologist and pioneer in developing and using innovation best practices. While CEO of SRI International, revenue tripled to $550 million per year and tens of billions of dollars of new marketplace value was created, such as through Siri, an SRI spin-off company that was bought by Steve Jobs at Apple.
While Carlson was CEO Mayfield Ventures partner, David Ladd, said, “SRI is now the best enterprise at turning its technology into economic value.”
He served on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF).
Here is a link to the article
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/strategy-creating-transformational-innovations-curt-carlson-ph-d-
Sunday, December 19, 2021
Education is being disrupted - and Nexttech Learning needs to continue to be on the cutting edge
15 years ago, the smartphones did not exist. Today more than half of the people on the planet carry one - with unlimited knowledge at their fingertips .
Covid has helped accelerate this inevitable disruption with the technological shifts such as working from home and the Zoom boom .
The way students learn has changed
We need to teach the skills needed to build Future Ready Skills that give learners the capacity to work in a variety of settings and emerging industries.
Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley knowledge share on the “future of work” a few years ago - pointed out that the average millenial will have 17 career changes and the days of having a single career are over.
The worker (who should be called “the lifelong learner” ) will constantly need to re-skill and up-skill.
Learning will become a life long experience - and we need to prepare students to be flexible, adaptive and creative. We need to teach them to “learn how to learn .”
The standard four-year-degree routine is a thing of the past.
Micro-credentials while “on the job” are more relevant, cost-effective, and valuables for are becoming more relevant when looking for a job.
The future of succesful organisations will be there alignment with universities and educational institutions.
Remote and hybrid models of learning are becoming the norm
https://bsi.com.au/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up-is-a-question-of-the-past/
https://bsi.com.au/we-need-to-start-getting-it-together-to-think-about-the-future-of-work/
The focus on Customer Service
People do not need to tolerate bad service - says David Shein (who sold his startup Comtech for $600m 20 years ago ). He shared with us how industries have been disrupted - because of a lack of customer service.
The taxi industry - disrupted by Uber
The hotel industry by Airbnb
The retail industry by Amazon
And …..
The Educational Industry by ….. Nexttech Learning.
Schools and universities who cling to an old model that no longer fits in with the expectation the 21st century will find themselves extinct.
Nexttech’s goal is to help the lifelong learner to become truly independent, self directed, managers of their own learning journey.
They will do this by partnering with their organisations - to make learning an integral part of the employers journey.
Some exciting programme
Nexttech’s StepUp programme - bringing 13–18 year old aspiring entrepreneurs together with corporate and government - and Bringing in the best founders, venture capitalist and industry thought leaders to hang out with them.
Their 100 plus Future Ready courses that the lifelong learner needs to thrive in a VUCA world.
The innovative ways for your team to do these courses - that enable them to get the best courses and instructors in the world, at a fraction of the cost of taking a face to face session - while saving time from all the travelling and making it fit their busy schedule without having to sacrifice their revenue earning potential or their family time.
It’s about being able to connect, collaborate and contribute with each other - on a continuous basis as we find creative solutions to some of our biggest challenges such as climate change, diversity equity and inclusion
And building a culture of “lifelong learning” in your organisation .