Educational Intelligence Replication
In Shanghai in 2009, I had a wide-ranging conversation with my good friend PY about the theory of human technological evolution.
What we discussed was a story of replication moving from hardware to software; and within software replication itself, a further evolution from the replication of information to the replication of knowledge, and ultimately to the replication of intelligence.
The above is not merely a historical story on a timeline. Within any organization today, at every moment there exists simultaneously a layered evolution encompassing all of the above elements (operating in a space of operations, not necessarily confined to a timeline).
Replication is the fundamental hallmark of industrialization; what is replicated and how it is replicated determines a company's basic positioning within its competitive space. The key to success for a new education industry company lies in whether it can identify and achieve this distinctive positioning so as to realize replication at a higher level.
Hardware Replication:
An education industry company first needs to succeed at hardware replication. Yet hardware replication cannot constitute a unique competitive advantage. Even if such an advantage exists in practice, it cannot persuade others, because what you can do, others can do as well—and likely already have.
Information Replication:
In this information age, information replication is also a necessary condition, but even if achieved it will not constitute a unique advantage—because, equally, what you can do, others can do as well, and already have (there are already many players doing this, and their informational content, including instructional content, is already quite rich).
Knowledge Replication and Intelligence Replication:
From a systems perspective, knowledge and intelligence have one fundamental distinction. Knowledge is a single input directly from human to system—that is, human methods and experience are deposited within the system and replicated. Intelligence, by contrast, is the system's capacity for self-regeneration arising from its internal feedback. By this definition, genuine intelligence replication is not yet something we can meaningfully speak of.
Therefore, the critical point at present lies in knowledge replication.
Knowledge replication (and the intelligence replication that may become achievable in the future) is the very foundation upon which a new education industry company can stand where others cannot; and from this foundational point, one can explain why a team of young teachers can be an advantageous resource for a new education industry company, and equally why franchise models in education that are mere pseudo-models are doomed to fail. But from this foundational point, much more can be explained as well.
_Related_
