Billion Dollar EdTech Idea 7: Making Academic Research Easily Digestible For The Workplace

University professors are some of the smartest people on the planet, continuously moving the needle on new knowledge. Their thinking and research is captured in a range of peer reviewed scientific journals across disciplines. One report estimates that >10 million papers get published every year. Yet, because of the complexity, hard to digest language, and nature of problems being addressed, working professionals are rarely able to dip into this treasure trove of information to learn and innovate.

While research is critical to society, tangible economic impact happens when research can be combined with other elements and capabilities to deliver a product or service. There is a big need to better integrate science and industry so researchers can work on relevant problems and companies can turn published research into a source of competitive advantage. One way this can happen is by setting up a community of practice in which:

• Professionals can easily discover new research / researchers by filtering by industry / function

• Professionals can give researchers relevant problems to work on by enabling access to new field sites and data sets

• Researchers can engage with professionals by hosting webinars, blogs, cohort based courses, conducting interviews and inviting professionals to campus

• Professionals can make the leap from research to actions by browsing easy to understand videos as opposed to the obscurity of scholarly language in pdfs

• Researchers get incentivised on applicability (count of professionals who end up using / rating the research) as opposed to novelty (count of citations)

For a society to become an innovation powerhouse, the quality of research matters as much as having an entrepreneurial culture and venture funding. The big opportunity for Edtech is to steer that research towards relevant real world problems and make it easily digestible for the workplace.