Pearson, the world's leading learning company and one of the most established names in the education realm, announced a new strategic partnership on Monday morning with none other than local incubator treasure, 1776. Pearson and 1776 will be working together to grow the ed tech community and expand the potential of those startups bent on developing a more innovative approach to education, an admirable and highly efficient move made by two cutting-edge names.
“America’s education system is at a crossroads and a forward-thinking approach is needed to solve many challenges,” said Evan Burfield, co-founder of 1776, in a press release. “Pearson is using technology to invent new ways of learning; and by working with organizations like 1776 and our startups, Pearson’s experts not only provide insights around data and technical integration strategies, they can advise startups on effectively penetrating and scaling in the education market.”
Donna Harris, co-founder of 1776, explained on the phone that there will be a representative from Pearson located on 1776's campus full-time to the advantage of ed tech startups, a go-to person for daily navigational purposes. Others from Pearson will be visiting as well.
"Ed tech startups [at 1776] will get access to executives not traditionally here in D.C., executives that fly in from places like London to do roundtables. It's an informal opportunity for startups to pitch and explain their challenges or the opportunities they foresee in the future while picking the brains of senior execs from the education realm," stated Harris.
What's more, developer and technical teams from Pearson will also be visiting to help guide startups toward the best way to utilize API interfaces for their apps. They'll be actively engaging in physical space and providing technical and industry experts to help foster the growth of ed tech companies just getting their feet off the ground.
"Pearson will be helping startups by mobilizing the kind of connections D.C. can really provide," Harris explained. "D.C. is the place people come to connect, but historically the connection hasn't been happening directly with startups, its been through policy. That's why 1776 is here, to get the Pearson's of the world to help the startup ecosystem."
As for how this partnership came to be, Harris said that 1776 reached out to Pearson, a company on their radar since the first few days of 1776 conceptual composition. They knew from early on that having companies like Pearson involved was going to be critical.
"We want them involved because they hold the key to subject matter expertise, talent resources, global distribution, venture capital, and more," Harris said.
"1776 is all about making the startup ecosystem visible outside of the local D.C. area so players like Pearson see us as a high potential place for interesting startups and really want to engage here. This provides them with an easy mechanism to get involved here. At the end of the day, we're bringing these resources already visiting D.C., but not engaging with the D.C. ecosystem, to the forefront of the ed tech world."
Other advantages to this partnership include a pipeline into Pearson's global programs. For example, Pearson has a well established accelerator program that ed tech startups incubated on the 1776 campus can now be referred to. The benefits for Pearson being that in participating in the incubator Pearson can have more visibility to startups they might be most helpful to, and will ultimately prove advantageous to their company.
"We support that," Harris explained. "The startups need to get connection in order to grow and we want them to be able to do so however the opportunity comes about. This partnership could be a game changer, and that's a win for us."
