Villgro conducted a diagnostic panel with ITeach Fellowship, which is improving learning outcomes in low-cost schools through a teacher training Fellowship.
The purpose of the panel was to understand the current status of the enterprise, build a business model, brainstorm lean experiments for untested hypotheses, identify risks and challenges and then brainstorm mitigation strategies for them.
Panel members: Mukesh Sharma of Villgro, education expert Rajesh Shethia, Geeta Goel of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
The panel spent two days at the Babu Jagjivan Ram English Medium School, Yerwada, Pune --
* They met the customers (school HMs and fellows) to understand the value proposition of iTeach for both stakeholders. The key assumption of recruitment being the biggest challenge was validated during the meeting.
* The panel, along with the iTeach team, brainstormed on different components of the Business Model Canvas to outline different customer segments, pricing strategy for each segment, outreach plan, and human resource requirement. The biggest theme for the discussion was to ensure the financial sustainability while maintaining the quality of training.
* Since the business model of iTeach is dependent on the academic calendar of schools, the team was pushed to think about scalability of the business, run pilots faster and reiterate based on customer feedback.
* Finally, the iTeach team decided to identify the top three customer segment and run customer validation on these segments, finalise the resources and funding requirement to run these pilots.
