The leading EdTech companies of today are transforming how education is perceived and approached. They are introducing numerous ways to connect teachers and students while providing multiple ways to enhance the teaching-learning process. These companies always focus on delivering the best while upholding learning, interactivity, and cooperation.
A renowned name in the EdTech industry that is making massive waves with its dedication and concerted efforts is TELANTO. It is an EdTech SAAS startup that enables and hosts university-industry collaborations. The company was founded in 2015 by Dr. Christian Acosta-Flamma and his wife Yamila. The idea for TELANTO emerged to address the gap between academia and industry. By bringing real-life business challenges into the university classroom, Dr. Acosta-Flamma saw the potential to revolutionize talent recruitment and innovation practices. TELANTO developed its custom platform to connect companies and students across the world and enable them to collaborate virtually. The company is structured on two pillars: the network – which brings together universities and companies of all profiles from all around the world, and the platform, which hosts the collaborations.
Mission, Vision, and Core Values
TELANTO’s mission is to serve learners around the world and improve their educational and professional opportunities by enabling them to solve real-world business challenges. The company is driven by the vision of creating a worldwide connected ecosystem of universities and companies engaging in collaborations for mutual benefit. It envisions a world where talent and innovation flow seamlessly between academia and industry. The values on which TELANTO was built are curiosity, passion, and innovation. As a company and a team, it practices agility, trust, resourcefulness and provides excellent service.
Assisting Teachers to Impart Quality Education
TELANTO enables educators to integrate experiential learning into their curriculum. The company’s platform and collaboration process help professors to source best-fit challenges for their course, as well as oversee their students’ work. Solving business challenges enables students to apply the knowledge gained during their course in a real-world context. By working in teams, students develop soft and transferable skills valuable in their future workplace. Exposure to and collaboration with business leaders offer students access to role models and the ability to learn directly from experts in their field. Through challenge-based collaboration, students are also given the opportunity to exercise their creativity and out-of-the-box thinking in coming up with innovative ideas that have the potential to make a real impact on an organization.
Enhancing Teaching Practices and Collaboration
The TELANTO platform and collaboration process have been structured uniquely to ensure the best possible collaboration experience for all parties involved. Industry partners have to formulate a Call for Solutions, explaining their business challenge and what they expect the students to deliver. On the other hand, the professor writes a Call for Challenges, which is more than a course syllabus. In this syllabus, they indicate what types of tasks their students are equipped to address. Both parties are invited to a meeting before confirming their collaboration. Then, students, challenge sponsors, and professors join a unique virtual collaboration space on the TELANTO platform. Students have access to all the information about the challenge, as well as several helpful project management features. The professor can set milestones that facilitate structuring and monitoring the collaboration. The challenge sponsor can also view the students’ progress and engage with them via a discussion board. Finally, the professor and company representative give students feedback on their solution and performance at the end of the collaboration.
Maintaining Strong Relations
TELANTO offers not only experiential learning technology but also a community. It develops and maintains close relationships with clients who benefit from expert guidance in developing best-fit challenges for student collaborations. The company’s network spans the globe, enabling collaborations among parties across borders. TELANTO follows an end-to-end process for university-industry collaborations that encourages close engagement between the company representative and educators. The collaboration is hosted on its custom-built platform, reflecting this process. At the end of the collaboration, students receive feedback from their professors, the company representative, and a digital certificate for use in professional pursuits.
The Leading Light
Dr. Christian Acosta-Flamma founded TELANTO based on his own industry experience. As an executive at SAP, he saw the tremendous potential for creating shared value among students, companies, and universities through challenge-based collaboration. Over the past six years, he has leveraged his knowledge and experience at the intersection of business and technology to build TELANTO – as a company, as a platform, and as a network. Dr. Acosta-Flamma has not only acted as the CEO of TELANTO, but also built the network of clients and delivered a coaching service to industry clients. Thanks to this personal oversight and involvement in all areas of TELANTO’s activity, Dr. Acosta-Flamma stands behind the continuous ideation and development of the start-up’s offering.
Achieving Success Dynamically
Owing to its dedicated endeavours, TELANTO has achieved many laurels. In 2021, it has been recognized with the EdTech Digest’s Cool Tool Award for the Best Hiring or Internships Solution. The EdTech Awards recognize the most remarkable players disrupting and creating value in the educational technology space. TELANTO has been featured in many articles, and the management has been invited to speak at events, including the Mobile World Congress.
Upgrading Constantly with Changing Times
The company’s management states that during these challenging times of the pandemic, the need for and value of TELANTO as a platform that enables experiential learning virtually, has become more evident than ever before. The entire collaboration process, from connecting companies and universities, to managing the students’ work, takes place online. Students no longer have to suffer the implications of not being mobile – through TELANTO, they get the opportunity to gain exposure to and experience with business leaders and challenges from all around the world. TELANTO is continuously upgrading its platform to improve user experience and ease of navigating the technology, as well as to increase student engagement amidst technology fatigue. The company is also developing online content such as masterclasses to share knowledge and create a sense of community.
Prepared for the Future
TELANTO aims to be the worldwide leader in experiential learning, enabling learners all around the world to collaborate on real-world business challenges. To this end, the management is gradually evolving the company and the business model to operate at greater scale, and host increasingly larger volumes of collaborations. TELANTO will also serve clients more flexibly, accommodating different types, modalities, and lengths of university-industry collaborations. It plans to move towards more digitization and automation of processes and functionalities as a company and SaaS provider. However, at the same time, it wants to preserve and nurture the human element behind the success of what it does. TELANTO aspires to embed university-industry collaboration into as many universities and companies as possible to truly revolutionize experiential learning, innovation, and talent recruitment. To accomplish the same, it will increasingly focus on community and ecosystem building, bringing together all players committed to improving education.
