More or less exactly ten years ago Innovation People, wanted to develop a strategy for the commercialisation of what had by then been researched as the SPICE Framework®.

Three Recommendations for Development

Sheffield Hallam University were commissioned to undertake a feasibility study to inform our thinking.  The outcome of this study came up with three recommendations, that we should develop:

1. ‘Mobile first’ technology through which to deploy the SPICE Framework®
2. An engaging and ideally ‘gamified’ user experience
3. A data driven environment that would enable the evaluation of performance and give immediate feedback.

As a business, we embraced these recommendations, but at a time when business software was predominantly developed in a desktop environment.  Use in a mobile environment tended to be simply a miniaturising of these desktop environments.

Ten years on from Sheffield Hallam University’s feasibility study and those three recommendations have been proved sound and sensible.  I can’t think of anyone of any standing in the Learning and Development professional who would advise against developing:

1. Mobile delivery, accessed from anywhere.
2. An engaging, attractive user experience
3. That is data-driven, evaluating behaviour change and measuring business impact.

Why wouldn’t a business choose such an approach to the delivery of development their people?

The Three Recommendations and the SPICE Ecosystem™

This is precisely the approach we have adopted developing the SPICE Ecosystem™.  It’s an approach that puts businesses in control of the delivery of the development of their people, enabling them to precisely target development, connecting it to the performance management of people across what in the SPICE Ecosystem™ is described as a ‘Hive of Connectivity’ in which a business might manage the development of its people, targeted through teams, and where that same business can track and compare outcomes (behaviour change) and outputs (performance) across those same teams and colleagues.  This seems the most natural and cost-efficient approach to developing people.

Three Predictions for Learning and Development

It is self-evident, Sheffield Hallam University were correct in their recommendations.  The SPICE Ecosystem™ proves that point.  It does so to the extent, Innovation People is making three predictions for the future of learning and development technologies:

• Firstly, that a dominant characteristic of learning and development will emerge as what we describe as curated, microLearning environments through which businesses access an array of targeted resources that meet their people’s needs. (By microLearning, we mean short, targeted and specific learning interventions).
• Secondly, learning and development environments will emerge that include uploaded user generated content that both contributes to the development of learning and development resources within a business and informs evaluation.
• Thirdly, that evaluation (assessing behavioural outcomes) and impact assessments (the measurement of performance outputs) will become a normal part of the learning and development process and, as might be supposed contribute to the emergence of new forms of learning.

It is our view that the outworking of these three predictions will lead to learning and development in the metaverse, or the next generation of engagement with the internet, by which we mean, in that connecting between on the one hand the practical, operational development of real-life people and on the other hand the development and curation of learning environments in the metaverse.

The benefits of the implementation of our predictions is clear for businesses in their being able to access, deliver and measure the effect of learning and development delivered and accessed anywhere and on demand.

The negative consequences of our predictions for conventional learning and development are clear, especially for face-to-face dependent delivery and for unsatisfactory eLearning that is only good for compliance and mandatory training.

Three Opportunities for Businesses

Having developed the SPICE Ecosystem™ and implemented the recommendations made to us, we are clear that what has been created is precisely in line with global trends in learning and development.  Having also gone on to be able to make our own informed predictions, it is absolutely obvious to us that businesses create advantage by:

• Building ‘hives of connectivity’ across teams and individuals where,
• Targeted learning and development can be delivered and
• Evaluation of outcome and the measurement of outputs are reliably made.

We’d be happy to be in touch about the emergence of learning and development technologies or SPICE Ecosystem™.  Visit www.spiceframework.com for more information or contact us at [email protected]

Written by Michael Croft

July 31, 2023