Ecosystems: The Evolution of a New Breed of Innovation in Education

• In Event: Entrepreneurship in Education: An Academic Debate

Abstract

The term innovation ecosystem refers to complex cooperative networks that exist among a variety of stakeholders whose collaborative efforts generate new ideas, products, and processes. When innovation ecosystems work, they allow organizations to create value that no single organization could have created alone.
Although the ecosystem model has been popular in the industrial sector for several years, it has only recently gained prominence in education. Innovation is emerging in the education sector as a result of diverse stakeholder engagement across public and private realms, involving educational practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and others in an increasingly dynamic and collaborative environment.
Using both quantitative and qualitative data, this paper is a comparative case study of two innovative education ecosystems, the iZone in New York City, and the Education Design Studio Incorporated at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Data include interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders, including students, teachers, school and district-level administrators, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. We also include descriptive statistics based on survey results.

The Cases
In 2010, the New York City Department of Education (DoE), created the Innovation Zone (iZone)—a subset of 250 K-12 schools, collectively serving 80,000 students—to facilitate the development and implementation of high-impact technology in schools. iZone schools serve as a testing ground for education technology apps vetted by the district through an app-development competition known as the Gap App Challenge. The goal of the competition is to foster collaborative relationships among schools, educators, and ed-tech companies that go beyond the usual customer-vendor relationship to yield robust technologies for classroom use.
Launched in August, 2013, the University of Pennsylvania’s Education Design Studio Incorporated is a unique incubator in which a private, not-for-profit university is proactively collaborating with for-profit educational companies, leveraging its research identity and serving as a point of interface between for-profit and not-for-profit stakeholders. Because this incubator is located in a top-tier research university, startups have access not only to traditional incubator resources but also to education researchers. EDSI’s partnership network with Philadelphia K-12 teachers and schools enables entrepreneurs to beta-test their products with students, teachers, administrators and other stakeholders. Products coming from this pipeline have the potential to be the most practical and useful for enhancing classroom instruction.

Conclusion
Educational ecosystems become innovation ecosystems when participants collectively engage with each other in order to produce innovative solutions—novel, robust ways to prepare students for competing and thriving in a global society—that none of the partners could have produced or taken to scale alone. By presenting a comparative case study of the iZone and EDSI, this paper presents two strong examples of innovation ecosystems from which much can be learned to advance innovation in the field of education.

Author

• Barbara Kurshan, University of Pennsylvania