The 10 Most Disruptive Ed-Tech Solution Providers, 2020

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Cymorg Inc.

Improving Business Outcomes for the Organization

The

Most

Disruptive

ED-TECH Solution Providers,

2020

Editor’s Desk Improving EdTech Businesses

C

ovid has forced schools around the world, to suspend physical classrooms and shift to online education. It has resulted in school closure in 190 countries, affecting 90% of students, almost 1.6 billion people globally.

In this situation, EdTech startups are helping schools and universities to adapt and evolve. The World Bank is working with ministries of education of several countries in support to utilize EdTech for students while schools are closed as a result of the pandemic.

Whether it is language apps, video conferencing tools, or online learning software, there has been a significant surge in EdTech usage since a couple of years. Last year EdTech already saw high growth and adoption in education technology, with global EdTech investments reaching €15.87 billion in 2019. The lockdown has increased the adoption of digital technology in education with global EdTech investment to grow by 15% in 2020.

Investments in the EdTech industry are growing and startups have been expanding globally, as the demand for high-quality online schooling is skyrocketing. The current pandemic not only demands the need to drive forward the digitalization of the education system but also clearly highlights the opportunity to replace the traditional and conventional education system.

While the world fights the outbreak, EdTech can expect significant growth as more people in the future will turn to digital education. International organizations like UNESCO also have their own list

which certainly increases the reach of the EdTech platforms. The current pandemic has revolutionized the EdTech startups and it is growing exponentially which means that EdTech is here to stay and the way students learn will never be the same.

The EdTech industry is helping students with course materials, intelligent textbooks, engaging video content, slide shows, activities, and assessments. The vision is clear: it’s about evolving education in a way never seen before.

Assessing the need of the hour Insights Success has come up with its upcoming edition The 10 Most Disruptive Ed-Tech Solution Providers, 2020 featuring a New York based company Cymorg Inc. A digital platform for assessing and developing organizational decision-making, using highly contextual gamified simulations, backed by behavioral analytics. Cymorg is built around a simple premise: people remember something they did and how it turned out, far better than they remember something they read or watched.

Let’s read such more stories of EdTech companies who with their contribution are making this world a better place. Also, don’t forget to read the articles and CXO’s written by our in-house editorial team and industrial experts respectively.

Bon Apetit!

rohit.chaturvedi@insightssuccess.com

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COVER STORY

Cymorg Improving Business Outcomes for the Organization

16 Better Approach Build-On EdTech for a Better World

ARTICLE

C O N T E N T S

CXO

20 Power Up Be Smart-or Vanish Why Utilities need to actively develop smart Micro-Grids

28 Learn from a Leader What a tech CEO can teach your business about digital

32 Industry Today The Impacts of Pandemic in Pharma and Biotech Laboratory

24 CommunityShare An Initiative for Collaborating Learning

Editor-in-Chief Sumita Sarkar Managing Editor Anish Miller

Executive Editor

Assistant Editors

Rohit Chaturvedi

Jenny Fernandes

Visualizer

Art & Design Director

David King

Asha Bange

Associate Designer Kushagra Gupta

Co-designer Kartik Balapurkar

Senior Sales Manager

Business Development Manager

Kshitij S

Peter Collins

Marketing Manager

Sales Executives

John Matthew

David, Martin, Dharmendra

Technical Head

Business Development Executives

Jacob Smile

Steve, Joe, Aidan, Binay

Technical Specialist Aditya

Digital Marketing Manager Marry D'Souza

SME-SMO Executive Amol Wadekar

Research Analyst Frank Adams

Database Management Stella Andrew

Circulation Manager Robert Brown

Technology Consultant David Stokes

sales@insightssuccess.com December, 2020

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Reprint rights remain solely with Insights Success.

Company Name

Featured Person

Brief

360Learning 360learning.com

Nicolas Hernandez Precident

360Learning empowers Learning and Development teams to drive culture and growth through Collaborative Learning.

Celemi celemi.com

Jay Jacobson President

Celemi's simulations and custom solutions are designed to improve business acumen and improve your bottom line.

City & Guilds Kineo kineo.com

Steve Lowenthal CEO

Kineo improves performance in business by creating a better workplace learning experience.

CommunityShare communityshare.us

Josh Schachter Founder & director

CommunityShare is an initiative that is re-imagining learning by revealing, connecting and sharing the wisdom, passion, stories and “real-world” expertise in local communities.

Cymorg Inc cymorg.com

Sriram Padmanabhan President & Founder

Cymorg is an AI platform on which contextual and dynamic business simulations can be configured for analyzing and developing the decision-making behavior of critical customerfacing teams at scale, thus improving business outcomes for the organization.

Edcamp Foundation edcamp.org

Hadley Ferguson CEO

Edcamps are free public events that leverage the knowledge and experiences of attendees by allowing educators to collaboratively determine topics for discussion the day of the event.

EDSBY edsby.com

John Myers CEO

Edsby is the most comprehensive digital learning and data system available for K-12.

Edthena edthena.com

Adam Geller CEO

Edthena was born from on-the-ground experience with challenges accessing and providing the right types of support at the right times.

Gamelearn game-learn.com

Ibrahim Jabary CEO

Gamelearn was the world’s first company to sell online serious games for corporate training.

iSpring Solutions ispringsolutions.com

Yury Uskov CEO

iSpring is a global leader in creating award-winning software for eLearning. Since 2005, iSpring Solutions, Inc. has helped thousands of businesses worldwide to advance their corporate training and spread best business practices.

COVER STORY

Improving Business Outcomes for the Organization

“We are not in the business of selling training simulations. We are in the business of simulating your unique business to train your employees.”

As technology becomes a vital part of everyone's daily life, it also comes to be more interconnected with education. Advancement in Education isn't limited to educational institutions; it plays a crucial role in how every organization operates — and how well apprentices are equipped to succeed in a digital-first future.

Using modern technology effectively whether in the classroom or at work requires more than just adding advanced technology and devices. An effective technology program comprises thought not only for hardware and software but also behavior and organizational culture. In order for technology to be effective, it must be available and accessible when employees need it.

Ed-Tech Solutions can help organizations efficiently implement their strategies by influencing employee behavior in alignment with desired outcomes. They also provide insightful reports for management on organizational culture.

A New York based company Cymorg Inc is a digital platform for assessing and developing organizational decision-making, using highly contextual gamified simulations, backed by behavioral analytics. The company improves organizational outcomes by improving the quality of organizational decision-making.

Cymorg provides the organization with a structured repository of organizational knowledge and senior leadership expectations about its own business model, strategy and values. It also delivers a mechanism for experiential dissemination of this repository to all senior managers in the organization, and a measure of the critical gaps in alignment around strategies and values, across decision-makers in the organization.

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elow are the highlights of the interview conducted between Insights Success and Sriram Padmanabhan:

What led to the inception of Cymorg?

Sriram: For 20 years before I started Cymorg, I have held positions of managerial responsibility across 3 continents. My last corporate role was as Sales Head for a business unit for a $500m organization. I realized that none of the countless Leadership Development Programs I had attended were helping me make any of the hard decisions I needed to make in the role. Sales leaders learn decision-making by making lots of decisions and seeing which ones work. Out of that insight came the idea of Cymorg: a “flight simulator” for developing market-facing decision-making.

Of course, unlike flight simulators which cater to a small number of plane makes and models, every organization is unique, and context is hugely important. There's a huge difference between selling microchips and selling potato chips, or even in the definition of the same competency exhibited while selling one or the other.

So my co-founder Sam and I decided to build not one – or a small number - of off-the-shelf generic simulations, but a platform on which every organization can quickly assemble its own unique simulation, for developing its talent.

Describe Cymorg's platform which address all the needs of its customers.

Cymorg is built around a simple premise: people remember something they did and how it turned out, far better than they remember something they read or watched.

Cymorg models your organization and the role of the employees being trained – their KPIs, the data they are privy to, the competencies they need to demonstrate in order for the organization's strategies to work. We interview SMEs and design realistic scenarios and dilemmas that exemplify the competencies required. We then invite participants to achieve realistic KPIs over a virtual time period, navigating their way through several

tricky scenarios – and every time they make a decision, they get closer to or further from their targets, and the Cymorg engine picks the next scenario to test them with.

Participants learn from the nudges provided by the game, from peer discussion, from coaching and from the insightful post-experience competency reports.

How does the company's solutions more productive comparatively to the other companies' solutions?

Management decisions are made, not in isolation, but within the context of market and competitive landscape, organizational goals, values and strategies. Any development tool that does not capture that context is going to be unable to make the tiniest bit of difference to the way a participant understands or executes her role.

So if all you want to do is to spend a chunk of change and check a box or two, please do not call us. If, however, you want to make an actual difference to the way your teams think and work, talk to us.

Give a detailed description of the featured person's influence over the company and the industry.

The founders – Sriram and Prasanth “Sam” Samavedam - designed Cymorg out of their own experiences working in market-facing leadership roles and selling to Fortune 100 firms around the world. We have a clear focus on the practical, contextual, and experiential – and share our end-users' healthy aversion to the academic and textbookish approaches currently prevalent in industry.

Describe in detail about the values that drives the company.

We have one overriding value that defines us: our success is linked to making a tangible difference to the behaviors that drive the business outcomes of every single client. We uniquely bring good old-fashioned client value focus to the Education Technology universe.

How are Cymorg's solutions contributing in the advancement of the education technology industry?

Cymorg is hyper-personalized, contextual, experiential, immersive, gamified, AI-led and analytics-rich. The education technology industry has been talking about

The 10 Most Disruptive Ed-Tech Solution Providers, 2020

each of these traits for the last few years, and now, in the post-COVID world, they may even be the only effective way to train managers.

What technologies is the company leveraging to make its solutions resourceful?

It is difficult to build the corporate education software of the future without using cutting edge technologies. We use Natural Language Processing and chatbot technology, Machine Learning for the core engine, gamification techniques, and a cloud-based micro-services architecture.

What are the company's future aspirations?

What strategies is it undertaking to achieve those goals?

We want to be known as the Ed Tech company that provides the best insights into organizational culture, and helps transform behavior in tangible ways linked to organizational strategy. At the moment, we're focusing on learning deeply from each client engagement, improving user experience and the ease of configuring the simulations to specific context. We are also partnering with premier academic institutions to improve the richness of the insights we offer our clients.

“If you want your market-facing teams to differentiate strongly, don't train them with the same cookie-cutter tools that your competition uses.”

& & 20 The

Most

SUCCESSFUL

BUSINESSWOMEN to Watch, 2020

kimberly Khoury

Paving her Way in Sustainability Development

16 | December 2020

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Better Approach

Build-On EdTech for a Better World

T

he education technology industry has even become important in this pandemic world.

The Edtech industry is providing education to every single student. The effective use of technology with education is building a culture where it has become accessible and effective for the students.

The digital platform for education supports both the teachers and the students. With the tools, the EdTech offers to build a community of learners is developing in society. For example, if a student has a doubt, being close with the platform solutions are shared immediately.

reaches the most remote locations of the world as well. It is the duty of the government to make available infrastructure facilities available everywhere in the country. So that 100% participation engagement is possible in all the areas of the world.

It is a platform where mentors, educators, guest speakers, hosts can serve their wisdom and experiences for the students. This also creates interest among the students when learning from a technological method which is the need of the hour.

Comparing it with the traditional way of teaching students cannot relate to the methods and the examples, as we have come a long way forward.

Finally, no matter how good the technology is, it is upon the humans to decide how good it is. The use of EdTech with a personal touch should be the goal of it.

No matter how good it is, if it lacks the human touch of teaching it will be of no use.

We should consider ourselves very lucky to be a part of this digital revolution where larger engagement of students can be involved. Already the lockdown has caused enough damage to the education world. Be it national or international, schools and universities are disturbed completely.

The Teaching method will see the revolution post covid with the EdTech ecosystem. The teachers have to review their old and conventional methods of teaching with innovative and technological tools. The EdTech will become more relevant because it matches the career aspirations of the students.

Today, there are a lot of platforms available for EdTech companies. The EdTech industry should always aim to reach every single student even the one who is far remote from the technology and build a network of education. The government will have to support this cause by building all the facilities required to make this dream come true. And, ensure all the children across the world reach their highest potential.

Thanks to the EdTech offerings of providing online education to continue teaching worldwide with customized learning and activities. Thinking from a global perspective it supports the sustainable literacy goals of increasing the literacy rate in the world.

Students also participate in higher amounts as it www.insightssuccess.com

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Power Up

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Josh Schachter the founder & director of CommunityShare

CommunityShare An Initiative for Collaborating Learning

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he global spread of COVID-19 caused in the suspension of classes for more than 850 million students internationally and disturbed the traditional way of teaching. Reviewing the situation, many countries started to offer online teaching in order to promote online education and reestablish the normal teaching order.

Prior to COVID-19, 40-60% of students were chronically disengaged in school and the pandemic has the potential to exacerbate this unless there is a new pathway for learning. The top reason students cite for disengaging and dropping out of high school is lack of interest because school is not relevant to their lives and career aspirations. Fortunately, a large body of research documents that real-world learning and community connections can heighten learner engagement, academic success and social mobility.

To address these challenges, CommunityShare, a company which developed an online platform that matches PK-12 and out-of-school educators and learners with community partners who serve as mentors, project collaborators, content-area consultants, guest speakers, field trip hosts and more.

Some think of the platform as a "human library" that empowers educators and learners to tap into local "human books" of wisdom and experience in their community.

Students at Borton Magnet School engaged with engineers, inventors and makers on a field trip to Crea ve Machines' fabrica on studio.

Photographer- Courtesy of Crea ve Machines

Story Behind the Inception The idea for CommunityShare arose out of Josh

Students at Hollinger K-8 School in Tucson work with ar st Kate Hodges to create ceramic cliff dwelings as part of a unit on Arizona history, culture and Sonoran Desert ecology.

Photographer- Josh Schachter www.insightssuccess.com

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CommunityShare catalyzes real-world learning experiences that foster relationships between caring adults and young people within regional learning ecosystems.

Students from Agua Caliente Elementary studied watersheds through field research, poetry and watercolors in partnership with ar sts.

Photographer- Julius Schlosburg

Schachter's own experiences as both a student and an educator. As an educator, he searched for ways to bring “real-world” relevance to his students. In 2006, Josh and his colleague Julie Kasper founded Finding Voice to support the literacy development, youth voice, and civic agency of refugee and immigrant high school students in Tucson, Arizona. “During the first year, we asked our students to write and photograph what “home” meant to them. Nearly every single image taken by the students illustrated a feeling of deep isolation and disconnection from the larger Tucson community,” states Josh. In light of this reality, Julie and Josh decided to work toward building bridges between the students and the community.

Equity is at the core of CommunityShare's work, as it was founded to ensure that all students, regardless of zipcode and socioeconomic background, have equitable access to the social, intellectual, cultural and creative capital in their community. Josh asserts “The reality is that who you know shape one's future, as much as what you know, in today's network-based world.”

More than an Online Education Platform CommunityShare was developed by educators for educators, so the solution is directly informed by those closest to the work and education challenges.

CommunityShare is unique in several ways. The online

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platform is designed to support both in-person and virtual connections between community partners, educators and students. The vision is to fulfil the need for solutions to be adaptable according to changing conditions; particularly critical in light of COVID-19. CommunityShare serves both educators in formal PK-12 schools and out-of-school learning spaces, like afterschool programs. Many platforms focus on specific content areas, like STEM or the arts, but the organization's community partners come from all fields and occupations.

CommunityShare is also unique in that the team not only ask community partners to share their professional “expertise “areas with students and educators, but also to consider sharing parts of their life experience, such as their cultural heritage or being the first to go to college in their family. Beyond its tech solution, the platform provides customized coaching and tools to help regional customers implement CommunityShare in their community. For example, it supports customers in developing a community partner engagement strategy, establishing a teacher fellowship around real-world learning, developing evaluation tools, and many other areas.

Here are some of the outcomes the team has seen through CommunityShare:

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88% of learners indicated CommunityShare increased their understanding of the real-world application of content they are learning in school Ÿ 77% of learners reported their CommunityShare experience increased their understanding of careers in a “significant” or “life-changing” way Ÿ 97% of educators indicated that CommunityShare increased learner engagement and ownership of their own learning Ÿ 100% of educators increased their social capital – community connections & relationships Ÿ

A Solution Oriented Mind Josh Schachter is the founder and director of CommunityShare. He is an educator, photographer, social entrepreneur, and social ecologist. He earned a master's degree in environmental management from Yale University.

Over the past 20 years he has facilitated community-based media projects with youth and nonprofits globally. He cofounded VOICES, a nonprofit that hired low-income youth as community journalists. Josh co-founded Finding Voice, a program supporting refugee/immigrant students. Josh oversees and manages CommunityShare's operations, partnerships and fund development.

CommunityShare, under the leadership of Josh and his team, has received national and global attention. In 2017,

Students at Hollinger K-8 School in Tucson work with ar st Kate Hodges to create a prickly-pear dyed, large scale tex le as part of a unit on Arizona history, culture and Sonoran Desert ecology.

Photographer- Courtesy of CommunityShare

CommunityShare was selected from over 200 applicants as one of 12 civic ventures to participate in the national Points of Light Foundation's CivicX Accelerator. In 2019 and 2020, the Finnish nonprofit HundrED selected CommunityShare as one of the top 100 global education innovations and the staff presented at HundrED's global summit in Helsinki. In 2020, Josh was selected as a fellow within the global Edmund Hillary Fellowship. He is a recognized thought leader in education, as he has presented at dozens of conferences across the globe from Finland to New Zealand to SXSWedu.

Visioning to Improve Learning Ecosystem As a result of CommunityShare's work and impact, educators and education organizations across the U.S. and globe – from New Mexico to New Zealand – have expressed an interest in bringing CommunityShare to their community. Over the past eight year, COVID-19 has only increased the demand for adaptive solutions that can support both remote and in-person learning in schools and out-of-school contexts.

Students at Hermosa Montessori School designed and created their own custom-built photo booth using a Raspberry Pi microcomputer through mentorship from a local IT expert.

Photographer- Julius Schlosburg www.insightssuccess.com

Due to this growing interest, the company expanding CommunityShare beyond its home base in Tucson, Arizona and is implementing its work in cities and schools in Arizona and New Mexico. It is licensing the platform to regional partners and providing virtual coaching to support implementation. Josh opines “Our goal is to bring CommunityShare to as many students, educators and communities across the country as possible to ensure that all young people have the support and resources to reach their potential. In order to realize this goal, we are exploring partnerships with regional and national customers across the country and look forward to connecting with others looking to weave their own learning ecosystem.”

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