supply-side
revenue streams. Bespoke companies need a constant stream of new business and competitive procurement is not a recipe for stable growth. The result of all this is that very few of the e-learning pioneer businesses are still around nowadays, and there are a minuscule number of bespoke e-learning millionaires. Who now remembers Maxim, Knowledge = Power, Adval, or more recently Intellego? Consider too the rather tarnished record of e-learning mergers and acquisitions. In 2005 alone, Huveaux took over Epic, Redtray bought BlueU, and Futuremedia acquired EBC, only to be taken over by Edvantage in 2008, which was sold in turn to Lumesse in 2011. Futuremedia’s ambitious plans included a public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange. I hope you were prudent enough to resist the temptation to invest. More recently we have seen Atlantic Link, Absolutely Training and Fuel
swallowed up, the latter acquired in 2007 by LRN, a US company whose purpose is “helping people around the world to do the right thing”. They are “not a business
with a mission, but instead a mission with a business” and “inspire principled performance through their core values of integrity, humility, passion and truth”. Always good to see impactful holistic paradigms being leveraged. The Epic name is itself a notable survivor of the fallout from e-learning M&As, back on its feet as an award-winning independent business, but one that readily admits to a narrow escape from oblivion. This chequered history of acquisitions highlights the point that there are few
advantages in size, and management problems tend to multiply as teams get larger and more dispersed. This ties in with another necessary element for long-term success – good leadership. It is a tough world out there and when companies lose their focus, as is almost inevitable in the shake-up after a merger, they can also lose their way.
Which brings me neatly to a success story. In the past few years, Kineo has
While the tools for building e-learning courseware have become simpler to use, the expertise required to script and design truly effective e-learning remains scarce
made perhaps the most impressive effort to break out from the pack. It has shown there is scope to establish brand value through substantial but well-targeted marketing spend and innovative leadership. From very early on it donned the open source mantle as a differentiator, and its use of the franchising model as a way of extending the brand internationally was a stroke of entrepreneurial flair. That strategy has earned the founders a cash windfall with the sale of the business, but is it a replicable route to long-term profitable growth, and will Kineo keep its focus post-merger? Time will tell. Despite all those mergers, takeovers and ambitious plans, there is still no dominant force in bespoke e-learning. It remains highly price-competitive and resource-constrained, with few economies of scale.
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