Winning the Thought Leaders

In SMARTHINKING's early days, I used to compare us to a well-respected art film -- we had won the art festivals, but we needed to show the box-office returns. Basically, the thought leaders and innovators of higher education agreed that SMARTHINKING was a great idea. However, we had to figure out a way to translate their approval into local sales. Fortunately, we did manage to show the returns for our online tutoring service.

Today, we are in the same situation for our new product, StraighterLine. We officially launched this about 2 months ago. Since then we have had rave reviews. Clayton Christensen, noted Harvard business school professor and expert on innovation called StraighterLine "disruptive." Richard Vedder, a former member of the Spellings Commission and noted expert on college cost and affordability, published an insightful blog post about our approach to academic labor. Tony Seuss a well-respected blogger and community college professor in Georgia published praise of the business model. For StraigtherLine, this is a terrific introduction to the national spotlight. Before you can win the popular press, you need to win the approval of the experts. We seem to have convinced the experts. Now, we need to convince individual students and schools.

While one would suspect that colleges might be very resistant to enrolling their students in someone else's developmental and general education courses, there seem to be a number of factors at work that could change that. First, state budgets are in woeful shape. This translates to budget cuts for colleges. These budget cuts are coming in a time of recession which usually causes enrollments to increase which means that colleges have to serve more students than ever before. With more students and less resources, StraighterLine is a powerful option to fulfill general and developmental education delivery. Second, the Gates Foundation just announced a signficant committment to community colleges. They are focusing on exactly the things that SMARTHINKING and StraighterLine have been built to support -- increasing student success, serving developmental students, and lowering costs. SMARTHINKING and StraighterLine are some of the few truly innovative approaches to these problems.

So, stay tuned as we try to take StraighterLine to a theater near you!