Are Schools on the Verge of a New Business Ecosystem?

A recent McKinsey podcast, "As sector borders dissolve, new business ecosystems emerge,"prompted me to think about the classic rigidity of sector borders in the education space; in other words, out tendency to think about early childhood programs and distinct from K-12 schools as distinct from higher education as distinct from adult learning and professional development. Or to silo "school" apart from other programs and businesses families depend on, such as sports teams, restaurants, transportation, and health care.The premise of the podcast is that technology makes it ever easier for sector boundaries to disappear and for whole new business ecosystems to emerge. Those who doubt "need look no farther than the phone in your pocket, your music and video in the cloud, the smart watch on your wrist, and the TV in your living room" These devices were once--not very long ago--segmented into different business ecosystems, but today are all connected in the same value production model.An interesting (and enormously generative) exercise for independent and international school boards would be to read the McKinsey background papers, listen to the podcast, and then discuss what a new school ecosystem might look like, what value it would bring to students and their families, and how it might be a competitive advantage for our schools to be the proverbial "tent pole" of such a system (to borrow a term from the entertainment industry).