Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the core, your innovation and what you’re doing with your company is around how the human brain learns. It’s not about mobile. It’s not about social. It’s not about sales. It’s really an innovation on how the human brain works. You’re applying it using mobile and social user interfaces on a specific business problem which is sales training and on-boarding.

Duncan Lennox: That’s absolutely correct. We talk about what we do as science-based and data-driven. That’s fundamentally our approach. It’s quite different from the classic approach to learning or education. You’re right that our technology and our methodology could be applied to anything. We’ve chosen to apply it in the area of sales but I think an important point is it’s true we don’t need mobile to do what we do. It’s also true that mobile turns out to be the perfect form factor to deliver our methodology.

Our methodology is based on answering a couple of questions three minutes a day. Then, our adaptive technology figures out what questions you should see today. It turns out that’s incredibly well-suited to using an iPhone. Mobile for us is a force multiplier. Even if you were to use a desktop computer, we’d still get lots of people using it because it’s fun and effective. The fact that it works so well on a small device really makes it substantially more useful because people can participate in it wherever they want.

We sales reps mostly doing their questions in the morning while they’re standing in a line at Starbucks, waiting on their latte. That makes it much more powerful because it brings the technology into where people are. The technology is integrated into their lives rather than the person having to adjust to the software as is typical with enterprise software. That turns out to be hugely powerful in getting people to engage in the process. It’s one of the reasons why we get such high engagement of over 94%.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to apply that principle or method of learning, where else would you apply that concept to start new companies? If you were to advise new entrepreneurs to look for ideas, what would be some of these ideas? Take some of the concept that you’re using in one context. What other context would this apply to nicely?

Duncan Lennox: I think that’s one of the things that’s so exciting about the place we’re at right now in the technology industry. We have these monumental shifts in technology that have gone on. Obviously, the existence of the Internet. Then, bringing us to mobile and the whole Big Data, cloud component of it. We can now start to apply the technology to problems that we could not look at before. If you look at the technology that we have, there’s almost no limit to where it could be applied. The way we teach people things today, we know now for a fact how the brain actually works.

The world is a complex place with many problems. I’ve been building enterprise learning technology for over 20 years now and one of the things that’s always been exciting to me is access to education. If there is any one thing that could really help make a difference in the world, it’s better access to education. What that education is might mean different things to different people in different parts of the world.

A technology like Qstream and others like it bring all of those things together. You’ve got anytime, anywhere technology that’s based on the latest brain science. That allows distribution and access to that education anywhere on the planet. Obviously, the deployment of mobile network has far exceeded the deployment of landline networks. You go into the developing world where they hadn’t even deployed landline because it was going to be so expensive to build the infrastructure, but they’ve put up cellular networks everywhere. Even on a cheap $20 Android smartphone, you can participate in Qstream. People anywhere on the planet could be using Qstream to learn anything.

A few years ago, we did a project with a number of NGOs. We did a project, for example, with USAID in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was about teaching new mothers about how to avoid passing HIV, which unfortunately many of them have, to their new-born children. That’s a scenario where we’re bringing access to education that wouldn’t have been possible without mobile technology and a bunch of other things.

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that you actually apply your technology to other use cases outside of the sales empowerment use case, which is your primary sweet spot?

Duncan Lennox: We do. We’ve done a number of projects. We, as a company, focus our efforts and resources on the sales enablement space. We have partners that take our technology and use it in a whole bunch of other areas. We’ve also done non-profit projects.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Is there anything else you want to add?

Duncan Lennox: I think we covered the basics of Qstream and what we’re all about.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox
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