"Philanthropy tends to mean charity. What's different is that IBM is using its resources over a long period of time to work in partnership with school systems."
A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who has studied and written about Reinventing Education.
You've said that Reinventing Education is a role model for other companies. What do you mean by that?
It's a role model for the way corporations can use their resources to make a contribution to change. It isn't simply that it's philanthropy. Philanthropy tends to mean charity: arm's length, noblesse oblige, write a check, walk away from it. What's different is that IBM is using its resources over a long period of time to work in partnership with school systems to apply technology to remove barriers and raise achievement and performance. There are very few examples of a sustained, sweeping long-term approach that attempts to really transform the nature of a social institution like education. So I think IBM is a role model and a pioneer in that regard.
Each one of these projects is not simply a local solution that works for that school system; each one of them is a process, a platform, that is transferable immediately all over the world. So the very way that Reinventing Education works is really different. It works the way companies need to operate in the global information age — that is, you need to have local experiments that turn into products or services that can be used anywhere in the world interchangeably. And that's what's impressive.
Have other companies followed IBM's lead? Are there other examples of companies that are effectively directing their resources toward helping education?
Well, in education no one has done anything on the scale of IBM, but there have been some examples of companies that have worked in partnership with particular school districts to find new solutions involving technology that brought a solution to education and also brought innovation to the company. And that's the other key, by the way. IBM has learned about technologies from having to apply them in school systems, because school systems are large and complex. The company benefits from this innovation process. That's again why we can't call it philanthropy; we have to say it's a two-way learning.
There are many companies that do interesting and useful things with education, but they don't have long-term impact — like sending volunteers into schools to tutor. That's a useful thing to do, but it doesn't transform the nature of the school system. Reinventing Education is aimed at transformation, and a kind of transformation that will bring schools into the same modern Internet-enabled digital world that businesses have been getting into.
