In my last update, I referenced how Stanford & University of California Berkeley lecturer Steve Blank in the Harvard Business Review May 2013 article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything” describes a new approach for launching start-ups.  Blank says that traditional, existing companies execute a business model.  Start-ups however look for one.  Lean start-ups define themselves from their inception as a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  This lies in stark contrast to assuming you are a repeatable and scalable business model within a detailed business plan.

What does this have to do with public education?  Never before has K-12 public education seen so many new technologies, products and services and new start-up companies behind them.  Matchbook Learning enters this space as one such start-up. 

From our founding inception we applied the lean start-up methodology creatively articulated and designed in the book “Business Model Generation” by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur.  We disavowed creating a lengthy tombstone of a business plan, 5-year projections or a long product development cycle. 

We started with several hypotheses we wanted to test, including:

1.  Could blended learning be an effective school turnaround strategy?
2.  Would bottom 5% schools, incentivized with Federal Funds (i.e. Race to the Top & School Improvement Grants) be receptive to trying blended learning?
3.  Could Matchbook design and implement a blended school model that worked for teachers as well as it worked for students – meeting both where they are and building their capacity as we go?
4.  Were their specific aspects of the model we could design to be both sustainable (i.e. within normal funding levels) and scalable (i.e. build and transfer capacity in a repeatable manner)? 
5.  Could bottom 5% schools if turned around represent a significant and positive disruptive force to the remaining 95% of schools?

Within 6 months of our inception, we launched or at least prototyped our first “product” at our first school – starting with just two subjects, Math & English Language Arts in grades 3 through 8.  Based on the success of that first launch, we expanded the prototype to cover all grades in the school (K-8) and all core subjects (Math, ELA, Science & Social Science).  We then expanded in our second year to a second school.

We use different learning management systems, different assessments and different content providers in each of our schools.  Again, I often get the question why not pick the same vendor(s) for all of your schools’ platform and content needs?  We believe that by prototyping different ones and receiving feedback from the schools on the pros and cons of each, we are in a better position to iterate, improve and further refine what we are doing.  We avoid the trap of signaling to the marketplace (and to ourselves) “we have it all figured out”. 

This also explains why we are communicating with teachers daily in their classrooms and bi-weekly outside of their classrooms.  We want our “product” development cycle to be agile, rapid and finely tuned to the needs of our teachers as they scaffold in their ability to become effective instructors with this new technology. 

Will this lean approach ultimately enable us to be successful?  Time will tell.  However, my hope is that more and more education start-ups spend more time testing their hypotheses with their customers (i.e. teachers & students), validating their product or pivoting to new or different hypotheses based on customer feedback, and waiting to scale and build out their company once an identifiable customer base has been created.  This would save education a lot of heartache. 

The failure rate for start-ups in general may be 75%.  However, as education start-ups, we have a greater moral responsibility to ensure our failure does not come at the expense of the children we serve due to flaws in the way we perceive and go to market.