Strong Partnerships
Demonstrate your company’s alignment with the values of collaboration, trust, and co-development by building and maintaining partnerships that are open, reliable, and mutually beneficial.
Why: Long-term success in education technology depends not only on products, but on relationships. Strong partnerships allow EdTech providers to exchange knowledge, align on shared values, and build tools that are truly useful and sustainable. These partnerships must go beyond transactions—they are rooted in openness, accountability, and mutual respect.
Partnerships may take many forms: between EdTech companies and educational institutions, between different EdTech providers, or within broader sector networks. Through collaboration, organisations can reduce duplication, improve interoperability, and accelerate innovation. Relationships built on trust enable shared experimentation, transparency when things go wrong, and honest conversations about what works and what does not.
Effective partnerships require time, consistency, and the willingness to learn together. As EdTech companies grow in size and maturity, they also grow in their ability to contribute to and benefit from strong ecosystems of collaboration.
Maturity levels – Commitments to Strong Partnerships
Level Zero - Commit to Openness and Integrity: You commit to engaging with others in a transparent, respectful, and reliable manner. At this stage, you ensure your communication is honest and timely. You avoid over-promising and take responsibility for your commitments. You are open to conversations with potential partners — whether institutions, other companies, or networks — and you recognise that trust must be earned through consistency and humility. You begin documenting how your solution can integrate or interoperate with others, to reduce silos and enable collaboration.
Junior Level - Commit to Shared Learning and Engagement: You commit to investing time in relationships and learning from your partners. You actively seek out collaboration opportunities, participate in relevant networks or events, and listen to the needs and perspectives of others. You begin developing shared practices, such as joint pilots, knowledge exchange sessions, or user group meetings. Internally, you assign responsibilities for partnership communication. You provide clear technical documentation to support interoperability and respond openly to feedback.
Medior Level - Commit to Structured, Multi-Way Partnerships: You commit to building structured partnerships based on mutual trust, shared goals, and continuous collaboration. You enter into formal partnerships with educational institutions, EdTech peers, or public-sector organisations. These include clear roles, joint objectives, and processes for accountability. You engage regularly in knowledge exchange with your partners and share insights gained from other contexts. Your product is developed with interoperability in mind, following agreed standards. You co-design features, align roadmaps where possible, and contribute to shared initiatives in the sector.
Senior level - Commit to Partnership as a Strategic Priority: You commit to making strong, value-aligned partnerships a central part of your organisational strategy and culture. You lead or actively contribute to multi-stakeholder networks that aim to improve the education ecosystem. Your partnerships are long-term and include formal mechanisms for co-development, impact monitoring, and governance. You share resources and research, facilitate open standards, and support partners’ growth as well as your own. Internally, you foster a culture where collaboration is valued, not just managed. You are recognised as a trustworthy, thoughtful, and generous partner in the field.
Good examples
Two EdTech companies co-developing an integration between their tools and sharing the joint technical documentation with institutions.
A company that runs quarterly partner roundtables with institutions and other EdTechs to share updates, gather input, and build collective insight.
An organisation that contributes staff time to sector-wide interoperability or open-data initiatives.
Bad examples
A product that actively blocks integration with other platforms, locking institutions into a single ecosystem.
A company that collects input from partners but never reports back on how it is used.
EdTech providers that see peers only as competitors, refusing to collaborate or share lessons learnt