The impact of technology and the internet on higher education, specifically on how they have enabled an unbundling of the constituent parts of the university, has been chronicled to death. This unbundling, and the consequent disruption it has entailed through the rise of MOOCs, sharing services such as Chegg, and employment marketplaces such as Campus Job has been detailed extensively.
In my previous post, I took a look at …
Is there a structured way to look at opportunities in Higher Ed? Say, if a startup wants to enter Higher Ed, how could it systematically identify all possible opportunities and thereby map out all potential business models in this space?
Historically, there were 3 clear spaces or opportunity areas in Higher Ed space. First, there was the University. Initially there was just the non-profit research-led university, which morphed into …
The St Stephen’s standoff between Principal Valson Thampu and student Devansh Mehta gets messier. The student has now been suspended and stripped of a prize that he won. In turn, he has sued the Principal. Meanwhile, NSUI, the congress-backed students union, has now got in to the picture protesting outside the college, and burning effigies of the Principal. Link.
Meanwhile articles lamenting the decline of the Stephanian spirit have …
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how graduates of less-known institutions find it hard to break through into Wall Street. This isn’t a new problem for lesser-known institutions. In fact this is one of the reasons why students compete hard to get into selective institutions such as Princeton or Williams, where there is a history of recruitment by big firms.
In the past, I have written about how selectivity …
Every monday, I publish a newsletter covering all things I find interesting in Higher Ed. Issue #18 is out. See http://eepurl.com/bi0bfj.…
“In the West, mobile phones started out as products for the affluent, and a decade passed before they were widely available to the middle class. In Africa, we needed to make them available right away to the very poor consumers. Our customers wouldn’t have access to the kind of money that Westerners paid for monthly mobile contracts. So we created better options for each market, such as prepaid or scratch …
Over the past 5-odd years, a new wave of universities have taken birth in India. This new wave include Ashoka, BML Munjal, OP Jindal, Shiv Nadar, Mahindra Ecole Centrale and Azim Premji. In the next few years, we will see more names added to this list including Bennett University (where I work).
What distinguishes these six from from other private universities such as Amity, Galgotia, VIT is their avowed pursuit …
The unbundling of the school stack is underway. Historically textbooks were the only part of the K-12 bundle that could be segregated from the full-stack. Separated from the stack, these could sell across schools and thus scale up. That explains why many of the biggest education players like Pearson etc are textbook cos.
What about other pieces?
Assessment is another that is clearly underway. In fact in India with the …
I have just finished reading Supermarketwala by Damodar Mall. It is an interesting book on India’s fast-growing modern retail sector by a retail venture CEO, and has a lot of insights for anyone working in India’s retail / service industry. Still what I found most interesting was a chapter on how D’Mart, India’s most profitable grocery / supermarket chain, and its founder Radha Kishan Damani (or RK Damani as …
Recently on Quora, I posted an answer to the question “What is the revenue model of apps like News In Shorts?”
I am posting my answer for readers of this blog.
I dont think News In Shorts (NiS) has a revenue model in mind. In fact I am not sure they will ever arrive at a B2C rev model. There is possibly a B2B model – they could …