Redefining learning in Africa through a technology unit

When I decided to establish a technology unit within Educor, my core goal was to deliver innovation within the group to give new meaning and life to education programmes we were delivering through our various brands. While we had both methods of teaching delivery — in-classroom and distance learning; I felt that our learners and prospective learners would need to be more infused into the learning process and have the ability to carry their learning with them anytime anywhere. Our education brands have an impressive legacy in the education market, with INTEC being over 100 years old, Lyceum College being over 90, and Damelin being over 69.

To enable this process to serve learning curriculum anywhere at any time, the business had to drive its own platform. Not work on any other platform. The synergy lay between serving our own content and pairing it with a tailored platform built on IP and insight from within. The vision demanded specific resources, infrastructure, and the challenge to drive competency based learning as a new product.

Gary P Pisano in his Harvard Busines Review article entitled ‘You need an Innovation strategy’, talked about the types of innovation a company can execute to capture and or create value.
“Certainly, technological innovation is a huge creator of economic value and a driver of competitive advantage. But some important innovations may have little to do with new technology. In the past couple of decades, we have seen a plethora of companies (Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn, Uber) master the art of business model innovation. Thus, in thinking about innovation opportunities, companies have a choice about how much of their efforts to focus on technological innovation and how much to invest in business model innovation.” https://hbr.org/2015/06/you-need-an-innovation-strategy

With setting up Emotion Studios, we felt we had come full circle in “ focusing on technological innovation and investing in business model innovation.”

The unit has been able to deliver minimum viable products within their product ambit — online learning tools — within a short space of time. All this while accruing a community of fast growing professionals who have come to know and love learning on the go, anytime, anywhere.