From Idea to Impact: Marketing Educational Innovations for Maximum Reach

April 23, 2025 | By Morgan Solender

Photos of Adrienne Woods and Julie Kelleher
Adrienne Woods and Julie Kelleher

In the latest episode of The SRI Homeroom, host Keith Heumiller is joined by Adrienne Woods, senior education researcher at SRI, and Julie Kelleher, founder of the Kelleher Consulting Group, to discuss how researchers and developers can use marketing strategies to scale evidence-based educational innovations.

Woods emphasizes that having a strong research foundation isn’t enough — products and programs need to be positioned effectively to reach the districts, schools, and educators who can benefit most.

“There’s a mentality that … if we build it, they will come, and that’s not necessarily true. Just because you’ve developed something that works really well, that does not mean that it’s going to get into schools.”

A key challenge, Woods explains, is that many education researchers are not trained to think like marketers, and some even hesitate to use sales language.

“Selling something to market feels a little icky to us. I’ve had conversations with people who have developed these interventions and they want to get them into schools, and I say, ‘You have got to sell it,’ and they’re like, ‘Ooh, sell? I don’t like that.”

Kelleher, drawing on nearly two decades of experience bringing edtech products to market, underscores the importance of understanding your audience and communicating clearly.

“If you have a good or a service that you want other people to use, whether for free or for a fee, then you need to a go-to-market strategy, to know the cost of [your innovation], how you distribute it”

Woods and Kelleher both point to free resources created by the LEARN Network that help support education innovators in bringing evidence-based educational products and programs to market.

These resources include: 

  • The LEARN to Scale Toolkit, designed to support researchers and developers in creating, testing, and scaling evidence-based educational products. The toolkit includes a Go-to-Market Playbook to help innovators think about how to focus their marketing and sales efforts on the customers most likely to derive value from their product.  
  • Stories of Scaling that highlight how other education innovators have successfully brought their products to market. 
  • Two research briefs that explore how decision-makers in schools and districts evaluate and select products.  

Listen to the full podcast episode below to learn more about how researchers and developers can overcome common hurdles and successfully scale evidence-based innovations in education.   

Access a transcript of the episode here. 

Browse all episodes of The SRI Homeroom on the podcast homepage. 

Tags: Evidence-based Innovation Research & Developers