Journey Through the Learner//Meets//Future Challenge: Part Two

This is the second article in a two-part series exploring trends and lessons learned from the Learner//Meets//Future Challenge. You can read the first article in the series here.

In July 2024, our Learner//Meets//Future Challenge winners began a six-month support program to scale their solutions and improve educational assessments for young learners. The support program components, presented with Craft Futures and funded by the Gates Foundation, included coaching, cohort meet-ups, and tailored workshops focused on creating and capturing value via different business models and go-to-market strategies.

A tailored approach

After running challenges for almost a decade, we’ve learned that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for an innovator support program. Although most cohorts share common needs like technical assistance or monitoring and evaluation support, each team enters the program with unique opportunities and challenges. This is why Solve’s support program model begins with a baseline survey, which prompts teams to set goals, identify priority focus areas, and share their preferred programming elements. With these insights in mind, we tailored our approach for the seven Learner//Meets//Future teams, many of which were at the early stages of prototyping or piloting new AI-powered assessments for PK-8 learners.

Expert facilitated workshops

Over the course of the program, the teams attended three cohort workshops customized to their survey responses, aimed at addressing key questions like:

“How can we best communicate our value to educators and district leaders?”
“How do we identify mission-aligned funders?”
“How can we get more and better feedback from our beneficiaries?”

The workshops coalesced around these questions and three interconnected topics: how to create value, capture value, and go to market with a designated strategy. Led by industry experts Carina Wong and Sam Ha of Craft Futures and bolstered by the collective knowledge and participation of solution winners, these workshops proved to be an invaluable part of the Learner//Meets//Future program. One team noted that the format of the workshops—starting with powerful questions and concepts in full-group discussion then breaking into small groups with their peers—gave them a higher level of clarity and focus to move forward.

Personalized coaching

Individual support extended beyond the workshops. Carina and Sam provided personalized coaching on foundational topics ranging from product innovation to navigating the world of philanthropy. Coaching is consistently rated as one of the most beneficial components of Solve’s support programs. It allows team leads to step back from their day-to-day and connect to their organization’s (and/or their own personal) purpose. The winners worked on diverse topics through coaching—from the tactical (redesigning pricing models) to the existential (discovering what they would like to learn).

I truly appreciated my one-on-one coaching . . . We went beyond discussing our solution to talking through my professional and even personal goals. [They] challenged me to reconsider and stretch my vision of what success and fulfillment could look like.

Cohort Meetings and Demo Day

Over the six months, the seven-winner cohort gathered virtually with a Solve staff facilitator for peer-to-peer sharing and learning. Often a favorite space for innovators, cohort meetings provide dedicated time for them to bounce ideas off of one another and benefit from shared knowledge within the group.

At the winners’ request, the Gates Foundation and Solve planned a program-end Demo Day for Foundation staff and other challenge affiliates, including judges and advisory members. The winners shared their progress and answered questions from the attendees. This format is useful to winners as a kickstart to further conversations with attendees. It also provided a space for the teams to hear more in-depth details about their peers’ work and learn from the feedback given.

There is nothing so helpful as an audience. By working together to produce this Demo and then arriving for questions, our team gained perspective on our work that would have been hard to get any other way.

Surveying for success

Team leads emphasized the long-term benefits and transformative potential of the customized support. For many winners, the funding and support program was the catalyst needed to take action on innovative assessment ideas already in the works. Solve often hears from innovators that they need early-stage support to take those crucial steps on their pathways to scale.

We went from a feature that had spent 18 months as a Post-It note to an actual live in-market tool.

In addition to tailored support, unrestricted prize funding enabled each team to put capital where they needed it most. From staff salaries to product development to tools necessary for efficiency and scale—$500,000 in flexible funding made a notable impact for each of the seven winners.

Solution Outputs

Each of the seven winners had a distinctive journey throughout the support program, even though many shared similar learning outcomes. Outputs varied across organizations: from new assessment rubrics and generating training data for new models, to numerous prototypes and a new scorecard feature, to the launch of multiple MVPs and one pilot across four states. Many solutions have since moved into testing and validation phases, deploying their new tools in classrooms to gain valuable user feedback. We hope you’ll continue to follow their work! See links below to keep up with the latest from these seven winners:

Looking forward with our innovators

Each innovator who participates in our support programs is unique, so each program is designed with the innovator in mind. From prototype to pilot, we work with our clients to meet our innovators exactly where they are, catalyzing scale and transformational impact. Read more about the winning solutions from the Learner//Meets//Future Challenge and learn how we can collaborate with your organization to launch a custom challenge or support program.