Sunday Posts

There is an argument, common in the education start-up scene, that one doesn't need to have prior education experience to create a successful education company. The reasoning goes - what's the point of knowing anything about something we are going to break apart?  Some go even further: Prior experience in education, for them, is a handicap. It breeds bad habits, with obsolete mental models.  And, this is not frivolous self-justification of a few founders: Investors put money on this basis. In fact, one person, a very experienced former University president struggled to raise money in Silicon Valley because he was too old for them and had done too much education already. His handicap was that he knew what he was talking about. No wonder then that we don't actually get to hear too many successful education start-ups. Some float a while on the bubble of private valuations, which is nothing special in this day and age of interest-free money, but almost alw...

Many entrepreneurs around the world are working to 'disrupt' education. They sincerely believe that the traditional model of education can be improved, can be made more inclusive and more responsive to the needs of the employers and of society at large.  But, sadly, most of these 'disruptive' attempts fail. In fact, all of them invariably fail; the ones that survive become anything but disruptive - they abandon their universe-denting ambitions and turn themselves into me-too universities. This is, lately, spawning the rise of anti-entrepreneurs in education - those who claim that education will be as it always was! Apart from this being historically incorrect, education has always changed with time and technology available, this is also patently unjust. The current systems of education exclude too many people, promote wrong ideals and limit rather than creating opportunities. Education is not only disruptible; it needs to be disrupted. As mid-life realism ca...

Employability training is big business.  As the disconnection between education and work gets wider, the efforts to bridge the gap moves from the fringes of the education enterprise to its centre-stage and even emerges as an independent form of Higher Ed by itself. In fact, making students employable at scale is the most favoured education model for venture capital backing, spawning a range of models and ideas, each claiming to be the ultimate global solution for employability. These global models have failed rather miserably, but new ones still keep coming. This may seem counterintuitive, but this is where ideology trumps rationality and experience. A walk through the graveyard of failed ideas should point towards two key problems: One, that there is no 'global service industry', the foundational assumption of doing employability at scale, and two, that employability, even in its narrowest sense, requires personal transformation, not just acquisition of ski...

We have come to love Innovation as the engine of growth and progress. Being innovative is no longer a pejorative, but a compliment; even totalitarian Governments set up innovation ecosystems and Analysts put innovation premium on company stocks. The Corporations want to reinvent themselves as colourful innovation hubs, the universities justify drawing public money for they bring about innovation, and it is not unusual for entrepreneurs in India to pray in front of an idol so that they can be more innovative. In short, innovation is eating the world - and, everyone, with power and money, wants to bring about innovation. As we celebrate innovation in conferences, it is easy to forget innovation is usually a complex affair. We love to speak about magical discoveries: A naked Archimedes running through the streets as he discovered his law, Galileo figuring out the secrets of the pendulum in one night after observing the Cathedral's chandelier swinging about, Darwin's great ...

I hope some people will agree with me if I say EdTech is over-rated. It's a nifty term, much broader than the older, nerdy, E-Learning; it is also a conscious claim to affinity with its famous and richer cousin, FinTech. What one gets to hear in the EdTech conference circuit is boasts about how many millions companies are raising, which is really meaningless in a world of loose monetary policy and inflated private valuations. The other most common refrain is how Educators don't get EdTech, which really means that this may be a set of characters in search of a play. Most of its boldest claims - Clouds of Schools, Self-directed Learners, Universal Access - remain forever in future, and only companies dealing with boring stuff - compliance training, video content, Learning Management System etc - make any money.  However, the overselling of EdTech creates bigger problems than sub-prime investment and pointless conferences. It crowds out the conversation about Education Innov...

Uber crossing $50 billion in private valuations, taking two years less than Facebook to get there, should focus minds on a new business model - that of User Networks! If it was unthinkable that an algorithm-led business can dramatically change things even in the most regulated industries and in most unlikely places (India is its second biggest market after US), this is fast becoming all the proof one ever needed. Whether this valuation will sustain (part of it may be due to the asset price inflation due to loose money), it is already a formidable business globally - and indeed, more than a fad!  Entrepreneurs everywhere are already studying Uber and how it got there. This article , which I was introduced to recently at a meeting, makes some interesting points about billion-dollar companies. There are many salient points worth noting here, but for me, the most important aspect is perhaps the delayed monitization, and made up through strong product/market fit or creation of net...

Joanna Venator and Richard Reeves makes an important point about the relationship between Social Mobility and Unpaid Internships ( see here ). While it is an apparently great way of connecting employers willing to allow young people work experience with students who can afford to do this for free, this gets in the way of social mobility. Not just richer and more connected parents get their children better quality internships, the very fact that some people can afford to do unpaid internships while most others can not, make the all-important difference. The equation is simple - employers hire for experience over anything else and internship provides a way to buy, as one still has to be able to afford to be an intern, experience. This is the way it has been, one could say. The other way of looking at it is that this is one aspect of education ripe for disruption. Internship is a product, which many can not afford. Its value is well established, but there are many non-consumers. And...

A few days ago, I was completely bleak about the possibility of introducing Higher Education innovation in India. ( See earlier post here ) However, my key points were perhaps already cliched, and with the benefit of little more perspective, it is worthwhile to review this topic with a different start point - what shape can Higher Ed innovation in India take? First, there is an enormous amount of corruption in Indian Higher Education sector, and it is growing with commercialisation. The students are justifiably sceptical about anything new or disruptive, and would rather put their faith on tried and tested, despite knowing that these public institutions are quaint and could not care less for them.  Second, while the students know that the choices they have are all poor, the default reaction to this realisation is not to try something new or innovative, but to ensure that one does not do anything foolish. So, while Indian education seems ripe for new and disruptive proposi...

Someone told me, new ideas in Higher Education do not work. He has a point - even Gerald Grant and David Riesman conclude along the same lines in their The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College - and paradoxically, the worse the crisis of educational exclusion or irrelevance in a country, the more difficult it is to introduce new ideas. The reason perhaps is that though in theory Higher Education is an enabler of social mobility, in practise, in many places, it is only a system of perpetuating social privilege. And, hence, even those who seek to climb the social ladder approach Higher Education with a conforming attitude, trying to disrupt everything else but not change the way to the gate of disruption. The lack of venturesome consumption, as Amar Bhide will put it, makes new enterprise and innovation extremely difficult in education. It does not indeed mean that businesses do not make money in Higher Education. They do, and lots of it. But, paradoxica...

When I talk about universities being obsolete in a decade, I usually get the bewildered looks measuring out whether I am crazy. How could an institutional form, which is perhaps the most expansive and at the peak of their prestige right at this moment, be in any danger of obsolescence? This conversation also angers some people, who see in all this a neo-liberal conspiracy and me as a messenger of the For-Profit side, though my case applies as much to For-Profit universities as much to the Not-For-Profit and Public ones. There is huge amount of data coming out measuring whether universities are good investment, particularly as the students have to pay the full cost of education in an increasing number of countries. The case for universities, for the champions of that side of the argument, are hinged either on a teleological argument, that universities have a specific purpose and they are indispensable in a democratic society, or on the existence of a graduate premium. But both the...

From this title, a lot of people will get there-we-go-again feeling. But I am not writing about the brilliance of Steve Jobs, his ability to put himself in the shoes of the consumer, or his commitment to beautiful design or usability. These things have been talked about before, and still gets talked about, as Apple continues to perform astonishingly well. This post is about just one rather mundane aspect of business strategy, where Apple outguns everyone else, and something the universities are really bad at, habitually. And, the point of this post is that perhaps time has come for the universities to look closely at Apple, because this one key strategic point is becoming ever more important. In his recent article in International New York Times about how Apple overtook Microsoft ( See the article here ), James Stewart emphasises the courage Apple has shown in cannibalising itself. They were unafraid to undermine their most successful products. Apple destroyed its own very succes...

All investors love disruption. This is the new mantra, a sales pitch that can't be denied: The dot-com era's 'dent in the universe' has lately become 'disruption'. Clayton Christensen should be worried. The history of management ideas is replete with examples of oversell. And, indeed, oversold ideas die quickly thereafter. The insight of disruption is a great idea, but when it is slapped around on everything, it loses its meaning. One would suspect that such a disruptive moment has now come to disruption. One case in point is the discussion about higher education. Everyone wants to disrupt higher education. Even the great and the good have caught up with the 'D' word. But wasn't Christensen's original insight about low quality, low price products disrupting the market leaders because they had overshot the customers' requirements and become unnecessarily expensive? Anyone for low quality education? Can Silicon Valley beat the price p...

I believe there is a billion dollar opportunity in Education in India, and I am not simply talking about demography. India has great demography, lots of young people and the second largest education market in the world, but that's besides the point. The billion dollar opportunity does not exist because it is a big market. Any Western institution will also tell you that it is an extremely poor market, where the students have very little money to pay. In fact, many Western institutions would rather focus on richer territories than India, because they have come to believe that India is almost impossible to make money in. And, this is precisely the opportunity. So, here is the argument: There is a billion dollar opportunity in Indian Education not because of its population, but the nature of the market - it is the ideal launchpad for a global education business. Before you laugh, consider this: Here is one of the world's most populous country, where the language of Hi...