Swedish EdTech industry: Dance-hungry players looking for floors, music and partners

Digital inclusion Skills supply Education and training

The pervasive effects of digitization on society as a whole are becoming increasingly apparent to all and sundry. One of them is that today there is a huge need for school pupils, students and professionals alike to find effective ways to learn and develop their skills. A new industry has emerged, consisting of actors who provide digital tools for learning and skills development in different ways and for different target groups. The industry is known as EdTech.

EdTech? As well known and identifiable as FinTech and MedTech? Hardly, at least not in Sweden. However, EdTech Sweden, with its roots in the former Rectors' Academy, is trying to remedy this. On Wednesday, a seminar with the apt name "Swedish EdTech - the black hole" was held in the Swedish Parliament.

After a number of voices, both Swedish and international (from e.g. the US, Norway and Finland, which have come much further in shaping their EdTech industries), shared their experiences, it became quite clear what the challenges are. At least in comparison with the much faster growing FinTech industry, for example. Namely:

  • Resource-poor and slow-moving clients, especially in the education sector (schools, universities).
  • Many and fragmented actors, with no clear division of roles regarding which parts of the learning and skills development process the different actors can collaborate on.

However, this should be affordable, as the needs, and therefore the business opportunities, are enormous. This is confirmed, for example, by the success of the Norwegian mathematics tool Kikora in gaining wide use among teachers throughout the United States.

Fundamentally, as in so many other cases, the challenges are about leadership. Nima Marefat from Digiexam testified during the seminar about how sluggish Swedish school and university organizations are compared to their much more business-minded counterparts in the US, UK and Australia, where Digiexam has achieved much greater dissemination of its services.

When it comes to leadership in Swedish schools, we have some hopes that the Swedish National Agency for Education's proposal for digitization strategies will give a boost to this. (We at IT&Telekomföretagen highlighted leadership as priority 1 in Dagens Samhälle in December). The Swedish National Agency for Education's proposal certainly contains promising statements about the need to raise the skills of principals, but more is needed to make it a reality. We will talk more about this at the next meeting, on May 13, of the IT & Telecom Companies' IT Competence Council.

Wednesday's EdTech meeting was a kick-off for a larger conference, Innovating Learning, organized by EdTech Sweden on 20 October. Do not miss it!