Adam is a rare edtech leader because he knows how to blend innovation with what’s required to drive marketing, sales, adoption, and growth. Pearson benefitted significantly from Adam’s pioneering leadership in higher ed, ELT and K12. I’ve also seen how Adam keenly identifies startups with potential and nurtures them to scale. Adam has the uncanny ability to see what others miss because of his relentless focus on the customer.
Adam quickly helped my company to sharpen our market analysis and go-to-market strategy. Every engagement with Adam is rewarding and requires you to “fasten your seatbelt”—he’s smart, incisive, listens hard, thinks quickly, brings tons of experience, and “get things done.” In just a few days, he delivered a highly valuable and insightful assessment and set of recommendations. I wholeheartedly recommend the services of enablinginsights!
Adam’s broad expertise and wisdom in ed-tech transformed how we operate, how we focus, how we work, and how we make hard decisions of where best to invest. His relentless focus on the customer and meticulous attention to data helped us to become laser-focused on the things that matter most in reaching our North Star. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Adam, and we consider ourselves lucky to have had the opportunity.
Adam played a pivotal role in our ambitious transformation to a leading technology solution provider. His strategic guidance shaped our digital-first strategy, and his mentorship, practical insights, and can-do approach pushed our teams to overcome challenges and make rapid progress. Adam made a significant impact on our success and is someone I’ve come to rely on as one of my most trusted advisors.
Adam brings market prescience, far-reaching vision, and decades of practical experience building edtech. His track record of success is unique in edtech and one would be hard pressed to find anyone with the same balance of business expertise, innovation, and passion for learning. These make enablinginsights an exceptional resource advising mature education businesses on their evolution through to startups on how to realize their potential.
Adam is one of the most exceptional strategy consultants I have ever worked with. He has the rare combination of skills and talent that one looks for in strategy leadership—a wide and deep understanding of the market and business models, a deep appreciation of operational practicalities, a relentless focus on customer benefits, and a drive for competitive innovation. It was a pleasure working with Adam and we’re already looking forward to working together again with enablinginsights.
enablinginsights helped us build a superior schools’ product, faster, and at lower cost. Adam has a very rare skill set in edtech. He delighted us every week with his incisive reviews and solutions—from strategy and market positioning, to product design and usability. Adam also transformed the way we thought about how to turn data into valuable insights for our customers. Work with enablinginsights if you get the chance—you won’t look back.
Adam provides that rare blend of strategy and “getting stuff done,” adapting to work effectively with a wide range of teams and cultures. He brings great business acumen, and ensures any strategy drives practical benefits to the customer and competitive differences to our business.
As a startup, we faced many difficult choices. Adam quickly understood our challenges and helped us sharpen our strategy using techniques that he’s honed in decades of producing market-winning edtech. He’s a visionary with exceptionally wide expertise and operational know-how for “getting stuff done.” Adam is smart, insightful, honest, and direct, and these attributes make enablinginsights a most trusted and reliable advisor for our startup.
As a large education company offering a broad portfolio of digital products & services, we faced complex decisions to be innovative, competitive, and cost-effective. Adam brought a can-do approach, a gifted strategic mind, a breadth of proven commercial and operational success developing edtech, and a relentless focus on the customer. He was instrumental in helping us reform into a customer-centric, data-driven edtech provider.
As a startup making critical choices during rapid growth, we have benefited enormously from enablinginsights’ incisive analysis and strategic advice—from product development and business models to market expansion. Adam has a well-earned reputation as a global leader having built some of the most successful edtech in the industry. While guided by an extraordinary breadth of experience, he’s never presumptive and tackles each challenge in search of practical solutions.
Adam is a unique talent in his ability to traverse all facets and levels of business strategy, quantitative market and product analysis, and edtech design. All at once a delightfully fun and inspiring colleague and a disciplined force of nature in driving focus on the few things that truly matter to win. Using his breadth and depth of experience, Adam’s passion for helping organizations accomplish great things is remarkable.
Navigating the publishing industry as a startup with a disruptive model is far from straightforward. Adam’s deeply analytical mindset, coupled with his decades of experience in the industry helped guide us to continue Perlego’s rapid growth. He is incredibly well-versed in the global edtech landscape, from strategy and business models, to product design and learning from users. He’s an exceptional problem-solver and simply a lot of fun to work with!
Adam displayed a great ability to understand our business very quickly and helped define our strategy around delivering impact and value for our test-takers and clients. Adam has the ability to sift through complex ideas in a clear and concise way. He was determined to help us to get great results, and was extremely energetic in turning high-level strategy into practical and pragmatic plans and making fast progress.
Adam stood out as the only edtech professional who had the courage and ambition to collaborate on creating and realizing a revolutionary vision for improving online learning [Pearson’s Mastering products]. In his broad vision, wide competence, and ability to identify the best ideas and turn them into impactful reality he rates with the very best ~10 people I’ve worked with—4 of whom have already won Nobel Prizes.
Adam is one of the brightest minds in edtech. He blends vision, market knowledge, and practical experience with a can-do approach that quickly moves insight into action. Adam helped us to rapidly hone our strategy, develop compelling evidence of customer success, and deploy an operational framework across our global organisation. I’m immensely grateful to Adam. If you’re wrestling with your edtech strategy, engage enablinginsights!
Adam is an edtech visionary, a strategist, a savvy businessman, and a passionate entrepreneur. With each interaction, Adam pushed me to expand my vision, think competitively, and always pursue what’s best for the customer, a viable business model, and supported by data. Adam’s ability to transform a business by crystalizing a vision, articulating a strategy, and helping multiple teams make fast and practical progress is exceptional.
Adam is the founder of enablinginsights and a recognized pioneer in helping leaders of edtech and education companies to achieve growth and transformation.
Announcing today Dr. Adam Black joins the Advisory Board of Faculty AI
Thank you to all the innovative edtech leaders who've invited enablinginsights in to help them to successfully change
Horizons of AI product innovation and adoption
Here's a short deck illustrating how to design more actionable edtech dashboards for educators applying the eleven principles I've previously published (combining practices from data visualization, education research, and cognitive science) to a fictional higher-education courseware product
Investing in efficacy research can sound like an indulgence for an edtech startup that’s moving quickly and staying lean. But from experience taking many major edtech products to market, I’ve found that smart investments in efficacy research will help you to design edtech that’s more impactful and more competitive—and faster. Here’s a short deck showing how to use levels of evidence to frame your competitive ambition, investment case, and roadmap.
An Impact Report helps build trust with customers by sharing your ambitions to do good. But too often the Impact Mission of an edtech business is independent from their Strategy. Annual Impact Reporting is then an exercise in whitewashing. By contrast, a learner-centered Impact Mission attracts great talent. And if your Impact Mission is your Business Strategy, it can propel teams to achieve outsized results. It’s a privilege to help Perlego design their Mission and Reporting.
Edtech can deliver powerful insights to teachers and learners. But, as data gets richer, edtech designers have to work harder to make it understandable and actionable. Here's a short deck of design principles I've developed over two decades (combining practices from data visualization, education research, and cognitive science) and recommended reading.
Outcomes-driven design puts your customer first. It keeps you and your teams focused on what your customers are trying to achieve. It enables you to engineer edtech to deliver greater value. It’s a paradigm changer. Here’s a powerful visual ana…
There’s a wealth of data emerging from edtech. To be successful in revealing useful and reliable insights, here are the battle-worn principles I’ve developed from two decades of analyzing behaviours, use cases, and outcomes.
Introduce us to your business, portfolio, and challenges. We will provide you with initial observations and insights.
Deep dive with leaders of areas you’d like us to explore. We will provide you with deeper observations and insights.
We will provide you with recommendations for priority areas to target and options of how we can help to meet your scope, speed, and budget.
