Remote Training, a case study

Last year I attended the IMD training ”Being Innovative” and one of the assignments was to use the Rogers Virus Model for Analyzing and Predicting Innovation Success. I chose to take a closer look at Remote education, our way to deliver training on a distance that has proven to be a great success for Informator in Sweden over the years. I'd like to share my analysis of its performance according to the 3 dimensions of the Virus Model.

1) First Infection - Referring to Rogers’ model: benefit-to-cost, simplicity, compatibility, trialability, observability, what is the likelihood of first infection?

I chose a successful innovation for Informator since six years, using live remote class training. Looking back, we might have had faster adoption if we’ve also had offered some sort of trial. It would have been fairly easy to offer some free remote seminars or something alike that would had given our customers a chance to actually get a firsthand look at the service.

We got the simplicity (just turn up in our premises as usual and our technicians has taken care of all IT-stuff), benefit to cost (same learning, less cost for travel), compatibility (no need for you to buy new hard/software) and pretty good at observability (we could have lift this part up better with testimonials and such from pleased clients). First infection without a doubt, was the benefit-to-cost!

2) Staying Power of the Idea: To what extent are “hot-button issues” addressed? Has the project/team been branded? What about durability, “stickiness”? What is the likelihood of infecting over and over again?

Hot-button-issues are addressed regularly, time-restraints is the number one detail when our clients don’t attend training/classes. Working with modern ways of delivering training when, where and how our clients demand is the number one priority!

The project team consists of some thought leaders from various departments, but hasn’t been branded as a specific team. Maybe we should be clearer when communicating this. As the remote class training has been successful when delivered to and from our own class rooms, we have worked hard to take it one step further and now offer Remote Cloud Access where the clients can participate live from where ever. This is our way of taking the innovation one step further and even if the possibility has been there for many years, the tech for actually delivering seamless live education has been less satisfying. Now it works and we work hard with this offer.

As more and more clients use remote training in some way, we do see a bigger demand for this and our costumer managers also gain confident in also speaking more about these values rather than just focusing on our products.

3) Infect the Right People: To what extent have opinion-leaders, trendsetters, highly-networked actors been addressed? What is the likelihood of creating a pandemic?

Over the last years we have spent more time networking and marketing our ways of delivering training in a modern way than just focusing on products that might be similar in comparison with our closest competitors. Key players as me and our CEO has addressed the topics as speakers on conferences and discussions with both our staff, our partners as well as our direct clients. We use the tools we talk about to prove why instead of just talking about the possibilities.

We also work close with organizations as EdTech, Swedsoft (IT & Telecom companies in Sweden) to raise the discussions from a technical platform to a higher level of understanding the best ways of gaining learning and development. Remote Training is for sure a pandemic when it comes to our line of business!

Looking at the bullets benefit-to-cost, simplicity, compatibility, trialability, observability and so on it does make all the sense in the world that all of these are key factors in rapid success and that all is necessary for fast and successful adoption. Even so, sometimes one or two factors might be missing and the end result will still be success. What I’ve learned here is that if all factors are in there from the beginning the adoption most definitely will take less time.

Before this exercise I wasn’t aware of Roger’s model, but the various key moments still feel pretty obvious to me and when reading more I can see the bigger picture. This is definitely something I myself will work harder on in upcoming innovations!

Read more about Remote Training: https://informator.se/leveransformer/instructor-led-remote-training

Read more about Rogers Model: http://www.personal.psu.edu/wxh139/Rogers.htm