Lessons on Lean Startups

For Anthony, he has limited access to funding so he's looking for lessons that he can leverage in a lean startup fashion.

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The high-cost path of Knewton is hard to reconcile with a Lean Startup mentality and it reinforces the decision to embrace such a mentality. However, the ability to raise such significant amounts of funding is intriguing. To the positive, the decisions to start using OERs as a way to compete against established and long tenured content publishers looks like a wise decision. Efforts such as Openstax and NROC speak to more openness regarding content and technology and a need to do some further exploration on business models.  

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ALEKS is a valuable case study as their openness with research is inspirational. Seeing that Knewton references ideas pioneered by ALEKS speaks to the credibility of their research. However, the acquisition of Knewton's assets by Wiley and of ALEKS by McGraw Hill speaks to the need to have both technology and content.

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N2Y is inspirational to Anthony on multiple levels. He hadn't thought of social entrepreneurship much before hearing about N2Y. The impact that they are having is impressive. But, even from a pure startup point of view, N2Y's accomplishments were achieved through knowing their audience and funding their own growth - which is a goal for Anthony.

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Some outstanding questions for Anthony include:

• Are there open source technologies that could be paired with OERs to construct an impactful solution that has minimum development and operational costs?

• Are there additional, underserved parts of the market where an approach like N2Y could be replicated? 

• Did the openness of ALEKS research lead it to better results and outcomes in comparison to hype without openness that was associated with Knewton?

• The question that arises is which is most important – technology or content? N2Y provides few details on their technology, but they sure seem to know their customer and the content needed.