Collaborating for inclusion

It takes time, money and an awful lot of thought to build technology products and services, especially when you're building something novel with frontier technologies. And it takes even more to scale up from an idea to a prototype to something that can be deployed at scale.

It’s therefore tempting to focus on the users who you can most easily reach and who you think are most likely to be able to pay. For many, this might mean targeting middle-class parents with disposable incomes. That is certainly the steer that we’ve had from most of our small number of interactions with venture capital firms to date.

The problem with that is, although we're confident that TANDEM can bring something to all children, we're not content to build a business and product that only works for part of society.  The more TANDEM “works” to help children to thrive and to strengthen their earliest relationships, the less comfortable we would be about access being limited to those with the most ability to pay for it.

And that is why the first people we spoke to very early in our journey were Nesta. Nesta are the UK's innovation agency who work to deliver social good across three ‘Missions’. One of these three missions is to give children ‘a fairer start’, by which they mean narrowing the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average.

Our pitch to Nesta was pretty simple: How might we be able to, working together, learn about the role of emerging AI technologies in young people’s lives, to help make sure that TANDEM and similar innovations are built with and for the least well off in society? We feel strongly that building an inclusive product and business model is something that needs to be thought of up front, rather than retro-fitted.

Our offer to Nesta was to provide them with access to our earliest prototypes, training and support on how they work, and also the opportunity to adapt/modify them as we learn together. In return, they supported these modifications, and crucially set about getting these early prototypes into the hands and homes of the people they’re most interested in working with; children growing up in disadvantaged communities. At the same time, Nesta have been exploring potential buyers and business models which could allow a platform like TANDEM to reach thousands or millions of children in these communities.

We, and Nesta, will share some of the conclusions, pivots and next steps from this ongoing work in a future blog, but in the meantime a couple of early reflections from our side of this collaboration.

Firstly, we might be biased, but we think this sort of partnership is a model for how the state and agencies like Nesta can help to shape the development of new technology. At the end of this project we’ll all have learnt a lot more through working together than we could have done working in isolation. This has been helped by working with a brilliant team at Nesta who have struck the perfect balance, challenging us and being supportive in equal parts.

Secondly, it’s scary - but critical - to release, carefully, your products into the real world. The moment of hitting ‘send’ on the email sharing TANDEM with users who we’re not directly building a relationship with was a bit scary… After all, every new product is imperfect, and sharing imperfections with others makes you feel exposed. But the upside is that doing this, and drawing on the rich networks that nesta have has taught us all more than enough to justify that nervousness. It’s also pushed us, as soon as we know what we’re building is safe and secure, to ‘ship’, rather than over-think/over-engineer… the latter being something that could come easily to us with our backgrounds in academia.

Finally, we’re still in the midst of collating our insights from this work, but based on the feedback we’ve had to date, we’re more confident than ever that we’re onto something with our mission to build digital tools to encourage and enable early childhood interaction. Hearing people tell us that TANDEM is positively influencing people’s relationships with their young child, that it's getting them reading and interacting in a new way, is more motivating than any term sheet or grant award ever could be.

We’ll share much more about what we’ve learnt and how we’re adjusting our approach based on this work in a future blog (or maybe even a podcast?) but in the meantime we just want to conclude by thanking both the team at Nesta and, especially, the parents and children who have taken part in this work; THANK YOU!