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Many companies striving to be good corporate citizens today face an internal tug of war between giving attention to community initiatives that address social problems and the growing demand to make environmental issues paramount.
Conquering the challenge of business-education collaboration
By Tim Wilson, Editor & Writer, Boston College Center
Collaboration across sectors is at the core of the Boston College Center’s new initiative to help business more effectively contribute to solving the problems of education in the United States. But bridging the usual competitive divide between companies will be just as critical to successfully delivering value to an enterprise more important than any single company.
Just such a collaborative effort is under way on the issue of educational assessment and it offers insight into how it can happen and what motivates the companies involved.
Andrew Thomson, the public sector consul on global education at Cisco Systems, has witnessed firsthand the power of this collaboration. The former Saskatchewan minister of learning tells how and why his company is working with Intel and Microsoft to maximize what they can bring to the table in a multi-sector approach to improving education.
Having made the transition from public sector official to a private sector education role, Thomson says he enjoys the benefit of getting to say what he wants. But while he can talk about the issues more freely, it’s the inability to take action on those issues that he finds frustrating in the private sector.
“All of our great ideas don’t go anywhere if you can’t get buy-in,” he explains. And that’s where the need for partnership and collaboration between sectors comes in.
To be a part of putting ideas into action, Cisco is in a partnership with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Association of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement aimed at transforming global educational assessment and improving learning outcomes. Joining Cisco in this effort are Intel and Microsoft. Thomson says the three companies came together in January at the Learning and Technology World Forum in London “with the intention of changing the world.”
The three large, global technology companies have different business models – Cisco sells networks, Microsoft sells licenses and Intel sells devices – but they all compete for attention in the education market. All three are also committed to changing education in the United States and globally, and, according to Thomson, their leadership became convinced through the World Economic Forum that “education itself was still the best way to drive change in the world.”
The sheer number and variety of educational systems worldwide poses a significant challenge to any effort to effect change on a global scale. Thomson points out, however, there are three characteristics common to any system of education that guides the partnership’s work:
- Education everywhere is a social construct. It is not an industry or a vocation. “People come together to provide skills competencies and abilities for their children to succeed.”
- Systems are comparable enough in their desire to measure progress. A kind of assessment unique to education is common across all systems.
- There is still an economic component to education. In all countries its purpose includes fostering social development, citizenship and an ability to participate in the economy.
Thomson says that collaborating to tackle the issue of educational assessment worldwide requires Cisco and the others to step out of their “comfort zone.” They are accustomed to relationships through which they sell billions of dollars in technology to the education sector. Now they have to listen to those same customers and ask what they are using it for.
“And sometimes saying to customers you don’t really need to buy more technology from us.” Thomson remarks. “What we need to do is figure out a better way to use it.” Figuring these things out cannot be driven by revenue generation, he stresses. “It’s not about selling more. It’s about changing things.”
The kind of change that Cisco, Intel and Microsoft are striving for will not happen without involving academics, countries (the owners of the educational systems) and corporations in identifying and assessing 21st century skills. Thomson points out that these “aren’t the skills that will get you hired. They are the skills that will you get fired if you don’t have them.”
The need for skills like collaboration, innovation, articulation and application of knowledge is common throughout the world in the 21st century. To determine how best to assess and monitor the teaching and learning of these skills worldwide will take an approach that involves all of the sectors of society where these skills are put to use.
Thomson says that the “Uncommon Table” the Boston College Center seeks to create for collaboration on education will need a “big tent.” That’s just the approach being taken by Cisco and the other companies. Their initiative on assessment draws from educators in Australia, Finland and Portugal, parts of Asia, and the United States, if the fragmentation of the U.S. educational system can be worked with. He says success will take willing partners open to foreign advice and academics prepared to collaborate and ready to adapt change into their own systems.
Just a few months into the collaboration on educational assessment, Thomson describes the process as “remarkable.”
“If we can find that right way to keep that disparate group of people working together; if we can find that right ecosystem at a national level to actually implement, we’re going to make a tremendous difference,” Thomson predicts.
“And that’s a difference that’s not there to drive revenue. It’s not there to create new product streams. It’s there simply to create a better world.”
