SMETE.ORG (Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education). A digital library and portal of services for teachers and students developed by the SMETE Open Federation. It provides access to online teaching and learning materials and communities engaged in the disciplines of science, math, engineering, and technology.

www.smete.org

XanEdu. This company specializes in the production and delivery of CoursePacks, customized premium content and services including research tools that are designed to assist higher education faculty in development of online courseware and students engaged in research. It holds large collections of copyright-cleared materials, including key business and public policy documents as well as digitized archived materials, some dating back to the fifteenth century.

xanedu.com/

The Future of Marketplaces
for e-Knowledge

The vignette of the Knowledge Content Exchange marketplace for e-knowledge is not far fetched. Similar ventures are undergoing trials today. Others are in development in Europe and North America. The unbundling of scholarly publishing, trade publishing, and other knowledge resources has the potential to free tens of billions of dollars in resources, reducing the cost of content. Equally important, this reinvention will empower individual providers of content, context, and narrative and the aggregators of demand, such as colleges, universities, other learning enterprises, corporations, and such like. Power relationships will never be the same.

An example is Learning Content eXchange (LCX), an emerging venture that endeavors to establish a meta-market for digital resources in the higher education space by meeting the needs of the consumers of digital goods — institutions, faculty, and students.

www.lcxcorp.com

This unbundling will occur through horizontal marketplaces that slice through the vertical silos of traditional publishers, universities, enterprise repositories, associations, government agencies, and other repositories of e-content.

Leadership in Innovation Comes from New Competitors. When it comes to creating genuine, paradigm-busting innovations, current market leaders seldom discover the breakthrough. As Clayton Christensen demonstrated in The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive innovation generally sneak in from below while the dominant players are focusing on satisfying existing customers and making incremental improvements. The new, technology supported innovations come from the low-end of the market, either domestically or in global settings. Over time, the innovative offerings get better, attracting new customers based on lower costs, convenience, and improved quality.

Clayton Christensen writes in The Innovator’s Dilemma that a successful value chain becomes, over time, increasingly focused on the needs of its established market . . . when a disruptive technology appears and begins to serve new markets with a new value proposition, the entire value chain is blindsided to the point of extinction. This tendency is exacerbated by the World Without Secrets. The effort involved in keeping up with enormous volumes of information in established markets pushes aside ideas and information about new opportunities and markets. This is true of individuals and institutions alike.

Richard Hunter, 2002