Tom Vander Ark: 5 Market Drivers & 5 Market Shapers

Today, I am circumspect about the education industry. The opportunity for scale and impact has never been greater, but we face particular and unique challenges. In any sector, growing a new business or teaching a big business to innovate are challenges. But U.S. education isn’t a market, in any traditional sense, it’s a complicated (predominantly) public delivery system.Growing a new business requires getting the right team focused on the right products, services, and customers. That’s particularly a challenge in education especially in the middle of the worst fiscal crisis in recent history. I live and watch this challenge every day in the venture space.We are living through, and in many respects leading, the historic shift to personal digital learning. The fact that anyone on the planet with access to broadband can learning almost anything is an important threshold in human history. But this phase change from print to digital and from age cohorts to individual learners will be uneven and unusual from city to city and state to state.The handful of big companies that we used to think of as textbook publishers are attempting to navigate this transition—and doing so thoughtfully. A decade from now a school board near you will still be adopting print. But it’s also true that the school down the street will likely have kids using tablets this fall. Before 2020 they will be teaching a Harvard Business School case study about how complicated Disrupting Class proved to be.
Click here to find my five market drivers and five forces shaping the opportunity set.