The booming market is primarily driven by the education consumption needs of Chinese parents, which are evolving rapidly. As millennials become parents of K-8 students, their perceptions of quality and value in English education generally and online education specifically are influencing the market in a major way. Attitudes toward education among millennials in China are conceptually different from those of their elders. Not only are millennials more willing to purchase online education products, but they also put more value on spoken English, creativity, experiential learning and other learning experiences deemed to be lacking in the Chinese system.

One reason why promising applications are not yet widely known is the long regulatory approval process. The regulatory bar is set much higher for chronic care products than for wellness products, such as the Apple Watch, making accuracy and reliability of paramount importance. While consumer-facing wellness products have proliferated in recent years thanks to light regulation, products which allow for efficient and high quality self-care of chronic ailments through at-home analysis have yet to achieve mass market success in the U.S., partly due to the longer approval process required by government regulators.

The Fit Bit and Apple Watch are merely glimpses of what is to come in this space. This category is growing quickly to encompass products and services that go beyond the much discussed “wellness” category. These devices, such as IoT-enabled insulin monitors, are held to ever increasing standards of patient usability and convenience, which means offering enhanced patient usability and convenience is another important driver of innovation in this segment. In the near future, patients with (type 1?) diabetes may be able to monitor their insulin levels using a contact lens developed in a collaboration between Novartis and Google, providing a better patient experience by eliminating the need to draw blood. Cornell University has developed a SMARTCard which can analyze a small blood sample for cholesterol levels and provide instant results on a patient’s smartphone through the use of its onboard camera. For patients to care for themselves using these systems, they must operate the devices and interfaces themselves making user friendliness and fool proof operation key concerns for product developers.

CI managers across enterprises are realizing that they are fighting a losing battle against the burgeoning diversity of data. Traditional data management systems are unable to cope with the variety of data, and analysts are consequently too bogged down in low-value repetitive data collation tasks to fully apply themselves to insight generation. Going forward, MI/CI projects will need to be anchored to what are colloquially known as ‘smart’ data lakes to be able to handle complex data from disparate sources. In such data lakes, all the data that a CI analyst has access to are interlinked and stored using a flexible data model so that depending on the project, the relevant data can be extracted and reused.

Companies providing education technology products such as personalized learning platforms face a unique set of obstacles working globally. We had the pleasure to get some first hand insight into this topic from David Joo, CEO of Knowre, an ed-tech provider offering adaptive learning math products in the United States, South Korea and other international markets. He will be participating in a SxSW panel discussion “Winning the Asian EdTech Market”, moderated by Emerging Strategy Director, Satoko Okamoto on March 8.