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Incubating High-IMPACT New Generation EdTech Disruptors for Inclusive & Personalised Learning

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Disrupting education: making ideas a reality

An EU-funded project helps start-ups and SMEs bring their digital education solutions to market via incubation, acceleration and mentoring services.

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High-quality, inclusive and accessible digital education is how the EU envisions education and training systems in Europe, as detailed in the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027). Addressing this key priority is the EU-funded IMPACT EdTech project. “It was created with the purpose of setting up a hybrid incubator-accelerator for educational technologies (EdTech) start-ups in Europe,” explains Romane Leaute, project coordinator at European Schoolnet. More specifically, it aimed to support European digital learning disruptors to move from promising prototypes towards viable products by setting up an EdTech-specific incubation environment offering both business and go-to-market support, and access to an education ecosystem providing expert knowledge. The project was managed by three organisations with complementary expertise: European Schoolnet, a non profit organisation representing 34 European Ministries of Education in Europe; ISDI, an accelerator and business and technology school for the digital era; and FundingBox, an organisation specialised in funding opportunities, partnerships and tech communities’ knowledge.

Accelerating top European start-ups and SMEs

“We supported a total of 43 start-ups and SMEs over three Open Calls, which we organised. These were selected out of a total of 751 applications as the most promising start-ups in educational digital learning,” outlines Maria Karpiłowska, project manager at FundingBox. These companies took part in a rigorous 9-month incubation acceleration programme during which they received training, mentoring, live testing, piloting in schools, and equity-free funding. “From its inception, the project had a strong focus on personalised digital learning and an aim to foster inclusive solutions that could help bring equity in gender, ability, and other areas, to education,” adds Emily Carroll, head of innovation programs at ISDI.

The incubation-acceleration journey

Through support, many companies quickly reached a high maturity level. “On average, the start-ups started the project at technology readiness level (TRL) of 5 and ended with a TRL of 8,” highlights Leaute. Moreover, there were a recorded 91 introductions made between start-ups and business partners, accelerators and early investors. “We also bridged the gap between the start-ups and end users and pedagogical experts’ educators, heads of schools, etc.,” notes Leaute. In fact, a number of educators and learners were involved in testing the prototypes, with almost 2 000 students from 18 different countries participating in testing and piloting activities. Paying particular attention to increasing the number of solutions distributed for children with special educational needs (SEN), four SEN-focused start-ups validated their prototype at the end of the incubation stage. “We also monitored the gender equity among participating start-ups and potential gender biases in the learning solutions. The start-ups counted on average 40 % of female employees,” adds Carroll.

Continuing the work: EmpowerED

“We are confident that start-ups will continue to grow and mature their solutions, and we will continue to support them in their future endeavours. We will also strive to enable more educators to embrace and implement disruptive educational technologies in their classroom,” reports Karpiłowska. The lessons learnt from IMPACT EdTech will be brought forward into a new project, EmpowerED, with the aim of establishing a pan European network. “The network will aim to better articulate the relationship between industry actions and public sector policies/programmes that support deployment of innovation in education,” concludes Leaute.

Keywords

IMPACT EdTech, start-ups, SME, digital education, digital learning, educational technologies, incubator-accelerator, personalised digital learning, special educational needs

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