When the Factory Became the Lab

Pic: Factory to the lab, illustration by Chitra Gurjar

Someone said or wrote, which, we don't know, but it read like this – Is there a problem that you can’t imagine not solving or is it the idea of running a product business that excites you? This is the story of how it was not an “or” but “and” that enabled the foundation of a new product business from an existing services one.

Many of our existing customers know Clearly Blue Digital (CB) through its work in the areas of e-learning, marketing and design services. Its visionary and maverick founder, Padmaja Narsipur, has worked tirelessly to fructify her passion and vision to build a solid knowledge services company that supports organisations in all phases of their growth, from pre-sales through product design, all the way to customer success.

CB’s learning division Bodh has grown around a solid foundation which has creative writers, designers, and instructional design experts who are energetic doers,  curious learners, deep thinkers and adept makers who come  together to deliver exceptional services around learning solutions. Through this journey of 7 years, Clearly Blue-Bodh has addressed  the learning needs of a variety of business verticals, educational institutions and new-age learning companies. Its e-learning courses have had an impact on learners and organisations – from NGO workers to technology professionals to senior executives and small-town business owners. In turn CB has learned a lot about learning, that set the stage for building learning products for the new age worker. 

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” Thomas Edison

Adeptic Creative Labs was incubated out of the experiences of Clearly Blue-Bodh in learning design and a recognition of the need for hybrid learning for corporate employees. 

Adeptic was born from a front and centre project rather than a side project that often happens when companies want to build products alongside services. Capitalising on an opportunity that presented itself with a right use case to deliver a combination of intervention-based learning supported with reinforcement, byte-sized, just enough learning that could be delivered on a mobile phone via any Learning Management System (LMS). Leveraging experience and CB’s strong foundations in learning, the first product rolled out in 2 months and was deployed directly on a customer platform. With the customer agreeing to try, buy and finance the product services, acted as the perfect catalyst for the product launch. Adeptic’s first product has been used by over 700 people and reports an Net Promoter Score of 9.6.

Understanding the learning needs of today’s workplace, Adeptic’s hybrid learning ecosystem has created product bundles to address multiple learning challenges. Some of the unique features of Adeptic’s solutions are: 

• Addresses short attention spans and diminished learning times

• Delivers context-based learning that’s just enough

• Packages learning into small but potent chunks that is delivered in sprints 

• Augments knowledge by reinforcement learning

• Enriches organisation capabilities by  helping employees absorb lateral skills through Adeptic’s digital learning library of such courses

Adeptic has miles to go, and we’ve firmly started down that road. Clearly Blue and Adeptic have built a symbiotic relationship between products and services that benefits both businesses by:  

• Maintaining competitiveness in the space of providing learning solutions and products

• Mutually contributing towards the growth of both by bringing together minds with learning, design and facilitator experience

• Balancing profitable outcomes to build better products and services

This symbiosis is set to continue, as Clearly Blue will continue to deliver learning services and consulting across domains. Every idea and insight that emerges from the ‘churning of the ocean’ that occurs in services (some may say ‘boiling of the ocean’!) shall be shared across the wall with Adeptic. The idea will be examined, the market researched and if found feasible, Adeptic Labs will start work on a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

It turns out that the factory for large scale courseware can actually incubate innovations in learning. Viva la experimentacion!