Thought leadership

Actively contribute to the field of education by sharing insights, best practices, and research through publications, conferences, and webinars.

Why: As education is still an actively developing field, it seeks pedagogical expertise and scientific reliability. Too often, ed-tech is technology driven, or technologies following hypes in the field. This can give the edtech field an unreliable, hit-and-miss pedagogical reputation. However, this absence of company-embedded thought leadership is actually a great opportunity. Demonstrating leadership in pedagogical and educational science is not just critical to aligning yourself on the path to true societal impact and establishing credibility, but also a way of increasing your impact by catalyzing transitions in the field. Think Tesla on EV’s, SpaceX for spaceflight, or Fairphone on electronics repairability and sustainability. A single player can catalyze an entire field through leadership, multiplying their impact.

Maturity levels

  1. Level Zero: Thought leadership activities are internal only. The company has no visible presence in industry conferences, webinars, or publications. Knowledge, insights, research, and best practices are not shared with the larger community. This reflects a wider attitude of being closed to the ed-tech community, and having little regard to contributing to the community, or inviting dialogue & critique from the community.

  2. Junior Level: Participating in external industry events, such as conferences and webinars, though mostly as an attendee rather than as a contributor. There's a recognition of the need to keep abreast of industry developments, and a willingness to learn from others in the field.

  3. Medior Level: Starting to participate not just as attendees but as speakers, panelists, or workshop leaders. Sharing & publishing some insights and findings, but these are mostly product-centric, rather than contributing to broader educational or pedagogical discussions. The company starts to align its strategies with emerging methods and objectives, and works to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of their offerings through data-backed research.

  4. Senior Level: Collaborate with educational institutions and public stakeholders to drive research, policy changes and catalyze transitions in the field. Regularly publish in-depth research, and they are invited to keynote industry events. Pioneering new pedagogies, methods, standards and metrics. They set benchmarks for other players in the industry to follow. They are not just selling a product, but shaping the conversation and direction of the field. Their contributions have significant and recognizable effects on educational practices and standards.

Good examples

Practical examples to help build understanding

  1. Tesla: Catalyzing the field on electrification, software-first, AI-first. Thought leadership and execution on direct-to-consumer sales, vertical integration. World-class reporting and pioneering of metrics (see impact reporting principle).

  2. SpaceX: Catalyzing the field on reusability, engineering mentality, sustainability. Thought leadership on economics and execution that already demonstrates 2 orders of magnitude cost reduction.

  3. Fairphone, Framework: Catalyzing the field on repairability and sustainability.

  4. KhanAcademy: Pioneering in offering a huge library of lessons for free, with novel methods. They continually share their insights on online education methodologies like recently on pedagogical applications of recent AI/LLM breakthroughs, conducting research on the effectiveness of their platform, and present at many edtech conferences and webinars.

  5. TonyChocolonely: Catalyzing the field on sourcing of ethically produced cacao.