Tessa Roscoe Blog #7: Implementation and Planning

This week's theme is planning the implementation of your social venture. The plan you develop is mostly dependent on the product itself (is it seasonal? themed?) and your customer's purchasing process. Anticipating when your customer will want to buy your product, and especially when they will be inclined to pay the most for it, is always a bit of a gamble, but timing it right is guaranteed to have major payoffs. Thus studying your customer and fully understanding their needs and the ecosystem that they operate within is imperative to planning the phases of your development and launch.

For my social venture, we operate almost entirely within the educational technology sector, and our product is consistently subject to the purchasing process of large schools. Our CEO has worked closely with local schools and is intimately familiar with how these schools schedule and justify large educational technology purchases. Typically these occur a year or more in advance of when the technology will deployed within the classroom (a feature of the industry criticized for slowing the development of edu-tech itself). They also tend to occur during Spring and Summer seasons, when School Boards debate school budgets and approve controversial proposals. Thus Birdbrain has to carefully plan it's launch of new products, and do significant customer development work within the school community to garner support for purchases when these issues come up for debate. Tis year-round process thus has distinct phases when the focus of activities shifts depending on the audience in power that season.

Birdbrain has an added layer of complexity in that its products require teacher training before the products can be used in the classroom. Getting teachers to complete the training activities ahead of time so as to enlist their support during debate season is a struggle, given teacher's busy schedules and the often perceived challenges to learning the new technology. We are looking into how we can get our training activities certified as "Continuing Education Certification" hours so the teachers have more incentive to volunteer for the training and get a greater reward out of participating. Moreover, the Hummingbird Duo Kit, the subject of my social venture, requires continuing purchases year-on-year or replacement equipment for parts that wear out. Asking school districts to set aside money in future budgets is nearly impossible given political limitations We are currently considering eliciting corporate sponsorship or donations to help fund these replacement purchases.

Specific to my International Classroom Exchange program, the complexity is further heightened by the challenges presented by partnering with international schools and attracting their participation in the program.  Certainly, endorsement of partnership with an international education company (like IB schools) would greatly reduce this barrier, and we are actively campaigning for such a partner. Luckily, international schools tend to observe similar purchasing cycles given the similarity in school year timing, but certainly each country presents it's own regulatory constraints. For example, we have found we are slow to get off the ground with my contact schools in China due to our struggle against the slow moving gears of the People's Party, but schools in Brazil might be ready to participate by the end of this school year.

IDEO, one of the nation's premier design firms, and Digital Promise, a Congressionally authorized nonprofit that focuses on encouraging innovation in education, recently teamed up for a workshop with educators to discover how to "further develop the education technology market in K-12 districts through evolving the ed-tech procurement process." Their resultant findings, summarized in a document called, "Evolving Ed-Tech Procurement in School Districts" (http://b.3cdn.net/dpromise/26d9101de6ad913ea4_mlbr83xdr.pdf), holds interesting and valuable insights into how to combat the challenges discussed herein.

They first looked at how to expand opportunities through six themes, such as school culture and sustainable resources. The group then built upon this discussion to build solutions, focused around five concepts, such as open procurement and creative financing. They identified underlying social motivations behind this rigorous purchasing process and examined how the district could combat them together. One example is, "Public scrutiny produces fear and risk aversion." The district's purchasing is available for public scrutiny and compliment, and this in turn reduced the district's willingness to try something new. One Superintendent of schools was quoted saying, "“Sometimes the status-quo is easier and safer than innovation.” The workshop then focused on finding constructive solutions to this problem through asking open-ended brainstorming questions like, "How might my district leverage public sentiment to garner long-term support?" or "How might my district leverage innovative financing to reduce risk?". Solutions generated included using CarrotMob, an app where "users vote with their money to change the practices of the businesses they visit and support in their community." and social impact bonds.

I would definitely recommend that any social ventures, within my class or other, that are dealing with purchasing challenges in the educational industry to review this document as the lessons it espouses are relevant to most ventures, not just educational technology. I would then challenges these classmates to do as we have and think, "If these same attitudes and fears are present in my industry, how can my venture begin to take steps to combat them?". Discovering ways, through the solutions presented in this document and the ensured resulting inspiration, that your venture can quell these concerns on the behalf of your customers will ensure your success over your competitor's.