Aligned Senior Leaders On The Opportunities Offered By The Metaverse For Education

We helped Pearson build an actionable strategic view on the Metaverse for education in an intensive workshop at the Epic Games Innovation Lab.

Background

As 25% of the population is expected to spend at least 1 hour in the Metaverse by 2026, the international learning and education company Pearson aims to appreciate the value and the use cases of the Metaverse for the future of education, and help leaders to identify practical opportunities and projects.

Brief

Being a world leader in learning, Pearson aspires to always stay ahead of the curve and serve future generations of learners. During a week of intensive sessions, Pearson brought together senior leaders from a range of disciplines, including Learning, Data and HR. With using the Metaverse for education being a top priority for trend-setters in the area, Pearson wanted to understand what it is, what opportunities it could bring for future generations and what it means for the business. They asked us to run an immersive in-person session to help senior leaders achieve the following:

Define an innovation roadmap
Agree on branding
Introduce new partners
Help execs understand current innovation capabilities
Help execs make sense of what this all means for the business

Approach

The domain of “Metaverse” is a highly complex and rather ambiguous area, so we took a two-pronged approach to ensure leaders build their contextual understanding while generating actionable insights:

Experiencing the use-cases of real products available today
Guiding strategic discussions around shifts in the customer and the propositions they’ll need

Partners and Real Applications
Inspiring leaders on a brand-new technology required being able to see it for real, and experiment with the art of possible. We partnered with innovative organisations such as Soul Machines, TaleSpin, Magic Leap and Epic Games to help bring to life a potentially abstract concept.
Breakout Reflection and Ideation Sessions
We guided leaders to reflect and share what their understanding of the Metaverse emerging from partners’ demos would mean for the future of the company, and ideate potential applications of the Metaverse for education.
Key Themes and Recommendations
Following the workshop, our team synthesised thoughts from the day and recapped the main areas that senior leadership see as relevant, important and a possible opportunity for Pearson. We formed a set of recommendations around how to explore each area, asking provocative questions around problem statements for customers which could be starting points for more specific solution ideation.

Outcomes

25+ leaders from UK and US joined an engaging and interactive strategy session held at Epic Games Innovation Lab in London to explore how to employ the Metaverse for education.

A number of key strategic themes emerged from the session, ranging from ethics to bias in content creation. The company Steerco is now agreeing on a point of view for the company.

Moreover, 4 practical and immediately implemented project ideas have been identified. Pearson is now implementing them alongside each partner.