Although most in the ed tech manufacturing and sales industry covet the first sale or the largest tender, I sincerely wonder if this priority is misplaced. An initial sale can certainly impress our competitors or draw the attention of previously inattentive customers, but that’s not the secret sauce of success in the educational market. No, the initial sale, no matter how large it is, will not necessarily crescendo into ongoing revenue or end-of-life replacement purchases.
For that to happen, the technology must be successfully implemented—apparent to all—in the school or university setting. And by “successful”, I mean to say that the technology must visibly become worth its weight in gold to educators and students alike. Reorders, scaling, and replacement purchases will then follow like bees to flowers.
So, our resounding theme today is this: if technology initiatives (and your products) are not implemented well (in schools or universities), regrettable things can or will happen. Take these next examples of technology peril to heart:
Case Study 1. After a handful of teachers attended a robot training, a school district purchased a few dozen robots to promote stem-based learning and coding. Due to teacher turnover, however, only one teacher who attended the training remained after that initial school year. This year, the robots are only used in one classroom. The sole remaining teacher laments “with correct planning, we would have offered continuing professional development to the teachers within our school, so all classes could have experienced the benefits”. But this was not to be.
Case Study 2. In yet another illustrative case, a school purchases VR headsets with funds received from an external donor. They were used for two years but now reside untouched within their protective carrying cases. Then the bottom fell out: Google discontinued their free Expeditions programs. Companies that provide “free stuff” can do that, it seems. Fast forward to today, and the VR gear has sat unused for the entire year. A lead teacher in the school bewails: “If we were to instil a little more planning upon purchasing the headsets, then perhaps there would have been a back-up plan set into place. In the meantime, no one has taken the time to research another source of virtual reality [content] and the headsets continue to collect dust”. She furtively discloses: “Although our school is overflowing with technology, the acquisition of new devices tends to occur rapidly with little forethought regarding long term use. We oftentimes set old technology to the side that many schools would consider advanced compared to the gambits in their own districts. The new technology remains unused due to lack of research, planning, and continuing professional development”.
Notice the death knell found in both case studies above: the new technology, initially part of a very large investment, now sits unused, untouched. The technology slowly goes away. Like they say: “Out of sight, out of mind”. Translated: no future orders coming to eager sales people, who must now search elsewhere for a new income stream.
A graduate student in my “Leadership for Technology Innovation” class at the University of Colorado-Denver astutely observed that, in her school setting,
“poor [technology] implementation always spirals towards the landfill of technological promise.”
Her peers in my graduate class, also K12 educators, roundly agreed. Schools and universities are legendary for their poorly managed technology implementations. The lack of ongoing professional development is an oft-committed cardinal sin in this arena. In my next article in this series, we will zero in on strategies that you and your firm can employ to guarantee greater implementation success by educators in your defined market—and thus secure a more enduring revenue stream from ongoing replacement sales and referrals. Stay tuned. – Len Scrogan
