It’s a chilly November morning in an overcast London, and Teach on Mars has a rendez-vous with the learning leader from one of the iconic maisons of the LVMH Group. Sense of déjà-vu here, or what? It must be that Learning & Performance Institute Awards time of year again!
The LPI Awards are arguably the most prestigious event of their kind in the annual UK EdTech industry calendar. The best of the best from the L&D space across the world submit their entries for the competition in September every year. Finalists are announced in October, and then meet the Judging Panel in person at a series of face-to-face November showcase meetings in London, where they make their case for winning one of the three prizes on offer in each category. They then have to contain their excitement for three whole months as they await the announcement of the winner at a Gala Awards Evening held in February.
Anything we do in 2019…
The run-up to Christmas last year saw Teach on Mars in London with Acqua di Parma to present their highly successful Yellow You mobile app to the Judging Panel as one of six Finalists in the Digital Transformation Category. When Gala night came around, both companies were delighted to walk away with a highly coveted Bronze Award – a great achievement for a first participation.
The 2020 edition of the LPI Awards are the biggest yet. With literally hundreds of entries from well over 50 countries. The Gala wil be streamed live across the planet. The whole event is a marvellous platform for learning companies of all sizes to demonstrate their capacity for innovation and their ability to have a measurable business impact.
…we can do in 2020
This year, Teach on Mars was delighted to submit an entry in the Learning Technologies Category in collaboration with Parfums Dior UK & Ireland. The entry focused on the compelling story of Parfums Dior’s deployment of the MyDior mobile learning app and the contribution it has made to the emergence of a “learn on the go” culture across their organisation.
From dozens of entries Teach on Mars/Parfums Dior was selected as one of just seven Finalists – which in of itself is no mean feat. And so it was that the morning of November 12 last saw Daniel Muccio, Digital Learning Project Manager for Parfums Dior, meeting the LPI Awards Judging Panel to talk about what he has been able to achieve utilising Teach on Mars technology, accompanied and assisted by Teach on Mars Chief Storyteller, Adam Charlesworth.
Technology so powerful it literally disappears
Up against fellow Finalists with tech-heavy solutions in areas such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Teach on Mars/Parfums Dior chose to showcase an approach that goes back to the fundamentals of learning technology. Learning is about people – and so learning technology should not be a distraction or a constraint or a source of complexity. It should be so powerful, so intuitive and so enabling that it literally blends into the background of a learner experience that places the individual – be he a learner, a trainer or a manager in the field – at the heart of the process.
Daniel told a compelling story of the simplicity and accessibility of the Teach on Mars technology. About how every single member of his learner population at Parfums Dior UK & Ireland, regardless of their tech background, was able to get to grips with the solution. About how it has enabled him to create a safe, reassuring environment where skills and behaviour development challenges are no longer threatening, or sources of stress and anxiety. He illustrated how the deep gamification of the Teach on Mars solution has made learning a fun, social experience. And how friendly competition has hugely accelerated the emergence of a learning culture based on collective intelligence and knowledge sharing across his point of sale network.
Digital learning with soul… underpinned by hard data
In painting this picture of a solution that enables the creation of a personalised human connection with every individual learner, Danny perfectly illustrated the Teach on Mars conviction that its technology delivers “digital learning with soul”.
At the same time, he underlined hard business benefits for Parfums Dior UK & Ireland. Benefits like a powerful mobile-native tool-suite that has enabled him to build critical new instructional design capability throughout his L&D team and his subject-matter expert community quickly and painlessly. Or like the deep-dive, real-time data on learning performance that Teach on Mars delivers to him and all his operational line managers, meaning they can home in on individual development challenges and make sure every team member gets precisely the targeted learning and performance coaching support they need.
All seven Finalists in the Learning Technologies category deserve sincere congratulations and Teach on Mars wishes them the best of luck. The red-and-white rocket team have their fingers crossed that their entry with Parfums Dior UK & Ireland will strike a chord with the Judging Panel.
All that remains now is to wait until February. The suspense is already unbearable!
On November 14, Teach on Mars announced the rollout of its activity in Belgium. The company is continuing its European development by expanding into the BeNeLux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) in order to consolidate its leadership in the mobile learning sector, by offering its organisations and learners the very best mobile-first training ecosystem. BeNeLux is a suitably mature European region for a mobile approach to learning and communication.
Teach on Mars has been active on all fronts since the beginning of the year and is expanding in many different directions. Following a funding round in January 2019, the opening of offices in London and Milan in the spring, the conclusion of a distribution partnership with DMM in Morocco and attendance at trade fairs in the United Kingdom and Switzerland in the autumn, the company has now set its sights on Northern Europe. Teach on Mars will launch its activity in BeNeLux and has set itself the goal of becoming the champion of new-generation digital learning there.
Teach on Mars is relying on the recognised expertise of Country Manager David Boulanger to lead its deployment in BeNeLux and distribute its service offering for companies and organisations. With 17 years’ experience in the digital learning sector, David Boulanger supports the development of potential through multimodal learning, and entertaining and innovative solutions. After running a benchmark training organisation with large French and Dutch-speaking Belgian accounts, his taste for innovation and enthusiasm naturally led him to this new challenge of developing mobile learning in the BeNeLux countries.
The launch of Teach on Mars activity in Belgium was formalised at the VOV trade fair on November 28 in Mechelen. This event attracts 2000 human resources professionals every two years. The company had its own stand at the show and organised a seminar on the theme of “Mobile learning in a training offer”.
“I’m very proud to represent the European leader in mobile learning in Belgium and Benelux. When I discovered the Teach on Mars solution, I was impressed with its new approach to tackling training in today’s world, and its innovative ecosystem that encourages learners to enhance their skills. I really fell in love with the brand and the solution!” explains David Boulanger, Country Manager of Teach on Mars Belgium.
“The launch of Teach on Mars in BeNeLux, as part of our ongoing European expansion strategy, opens the door to new development opportunities in Northern Europe. In addition to our professional ties, David and I share the same human philosophy of entrepreneurship and the same commitments towards society. David chairs ECPAT Belgium, an organisation that Teach on Mars also supports, a sign that our paths would eventually converge and that we were made to collaborate together,” says Vincent Desnot, Teach on Mars Co-founder and CEO.
Clotilde joined Teach on Mars in 2017, after 15 years in marketing and communications with international groups (PSA Peugeot Citroën, Vinci Airports and Air France). She brings her marketing skills (product, market analysis, branding and customer services) to make Teach on Mars shine.
In yet another endorsement of the quality of its mobile-led next-gen learning solution, Teach on Mars has again been selected for the Learning and Performance Institute’s Top 15 Learning Technology Providers List, which was announced in London last October 8. This is the second year running that the European mobile learning leader has received this prestigious accolade, twelve months after gatecrashing the chart at its very first attempt in October 2018.
A global reference for technology and service
The Learning and Performance Institute (LPI) is the UK’s premier industry organisation dedicated to furthering and promoting workplace learning. In the final quarter of each year, it publishes a list of the 15 learning technology providers who performed the best in their annual accreditation process. For the companies selected, a place in the list means they were singled out from literally hundreds of organisational learning providers from all over the world as having shown exceptional performance above and beyond that of the competition in areas such as Client Value Proposition, Technology Offer, Consulting Capability, Quality Management, Product Roadmap and People Development. For prospective and existing customers, seeing that a company has made the Top 15 Highest Performing Learning Technology Providers is their guarantee that they are dealing with a trusted business partner with a proven track record of delivering highest-quality service and the best user experience. Just as importantly, clients seek out members of the LPI’s list for their capacity for innovation, their commitment to L&D-related research and development, the quality of their vision and their readiness to challenge existing paradigms and contribute to the enrichment of the new organisational learning landscape.
Gathering pace in the UK…
Confirmation that Teach on Mars remains in the LPI Top 15 list for 2019 comes after a hectic period of development during which the red-and-white rocket has cemented its place as a genuine player in the highly competitive UK EdTech space. Earlier in the year, Teach on Mars won a coveted Bronze Award in the Digital Transformation category of the highly prestigious LPI learning Awards. This prize, which was won in association with Acqua di Parma from the LVMH Group for work on the wildly successful YellowYou mobile learning app project, saw Teach on Mars seeing off competition from some of the biggest names in global L&D. And it has just been announced that Teach on Mars is a Finalist again in the 2020 edition of the LPI Awards, this time in the Learning Technologies category, and in association with Parfums Christian Dior (again, from the LVMH Group). Fingers are crossed that the company will be on the podium again when the results are announced next February.
…and much more to come
What’s more, the Sophia-Antipolis outfit shows no signs of easing up the pace just yet. October 2019 also saw the release of Callisto, the latest release of the Teach on Mars and almost certainly the most significant in the company’s history. This new version of the mobile-led solution places individuals and the personal, human connections between them at the very heart of the learning ecosystem. For the very first time, social functionality is integrated within the app, and a revolutionary in-app mobile Manager Dashboard also makes its debut. In addition, Callisto sees Teach on Mars taking the lead in the key development area of data-driven learning, with AI algorithms and connection to business intelligence tools breaking new ground for workplace solutions in terms of relevance, personalisation and business impact.
Vincent Desnot, co-founder and CEO of Teach on Mars, was interviewed on the programme BFM Life, the weekend morning show of BFM Business, on October 5, 2019.
Journalist presenter Julien Gagliardi talked to four guests in an episode dedicated to “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): what opportunities for companies?” in the “Big Picture” part of the show. The four participants, Fella Imalhayene (Executive Director of Global Compact France), Florence Morgen (Sustainable Development Director of VYV Group), Arnaud Breuil (Ecosystem and Engagement Manager of UP Group) and Vincent expressed their views on the question “How do companies embrace the SDGs, and for what economic and human benefits?”.
This was an opportunity for Vincent not only to clarify how Teach on Mars works in education and sustainable development through its charity, but also to talk about the launch of the Teach on Earth application dedicated to SDGs, and released on September 25 to coincide with the fourth anniversary of their adoption.
The interview allowed Vincent to remind viewers of how mobile learning can serve sustainable development. The three takeaways from Vincent’s contribution: the Teach on Mars solution is a “massive training weapon and it would be criminal not to use it for educational issues” unlike big companies that embrace the problem, “as a start-up, it’s the problem that embraced us” because “we want to change the world as a start-up!” the purpose of the Teach on Earth application is to educate the general public and raise awareness of the SDGs. The app is therefore Teach on Mars’ contribution to them. Vincent also made sure he quoted Nelson Mandela who believed “education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.”
Clotilde joined Teach on Mars in 2017, after 15 years in marketing and communications with international groups (PSA Peugeot Citroën, Vinci Airports and Air France). She brings her marketing skills (product, market analysis, branding and customer services) to make Teach on Mars shine.
FrenchWeb.fr, a magazine dedicated to all things innovation, has just unveiled the 2019 edition of FrenchWeb 500, the ranking for French Tech growth companies. Created four years ago, the FW500 classification provides an overview of start-ups, SMEs and large corporations in the French Tech ecosystem.
For the second year in a row, Teach on Mars features in the list. This year the company is ranked 206th, up two places from its 2018 position.
It’s worth noting that:
the ranking includes household name companies (Le Bon Coin Group, Veepee, Cdiscount, BlaBlaCar, ManoMano, Doctolib, Vinci Energies, etc.) and smaller start-ups,
29% of the companies in the ranking are software publishers, like us,
Teach on Mars is still “relatively young”, given that the average age of companies in the ranking is 11 years.
The Data and Analysis team of Decode Media had the huge task of “crunching” the data provided by the many companies applying to be listed in the FW500. The final ranking was produced by rating companies over five criteria to assess their growth potential: 2018 revenues, revenue growth between 2017 and 2018, revenue per employee ratio, 2018 net income to revenue ratio, and a growth potential indicator calculated on the basis of hires and capital raised.
“This fourth edition of the FW500 reveals the many faces of French Tech. It includes innovative start-ups in hypergrowth alongside great little examples of software publishers that have managed to both develop their market share while ensuring their business is highly profitable. This 2019 edition sees the arrival of new, much larger players, in particular industrial companies whose digital transformation processes have reached maturity,” explains Richard Menneveux, CEO and founder of Decode Media (publisher of FrenchWeb.fr).
Clotilde joined Teach on Mars in 2017, after 15 years in marketing and communications with international groups (PSA Peugeot Citroën, Vinci Airports and Air France). She brings her marketing skills (product, market analysis, branding and customer services) to make Teach on Mars shine.
On August 29th, the Disneyland Paris group launched Disney Stars, its brand new training application for its travel agents, in collaboration with Teach on Mars.
A new design for the Disney training program!
This dedicated application allows travel agents to learn and train from their smartphone when they want and where they want. Employees are kept informed of news (restaurants, shops, attractions …), promotional operations and sales advice. Over the modules and their progression, agents validate their knowledge and become experts. They can then boost their sales and enjoy exclusive B2B benefits.
In his app, the employee can wander on his news feed where he finds posts and fact sheets on news and information related to Disneyland Paris. He then accesses his training on different themes: “I want to know more”, “What’s new”, “I want to sell +”, etc. Each module is characterized by its fun aspect and ends with a quiz in which the employee can take up the challenge in solo or in a duet with his colleagues.
After France, Disney Stars is heading to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and will win 12 other countries by 2020. Disney Stars is available on App Store, Google Play and web version.
Graduated from a business school and passionate about innovations in the digital world, Noémie put on her diving suit and joined the Teach on Mars team as Content Manager. She is involved in the field of content marketing while contributing to Teach on Earth, a social and environmental initiative.
