This article is sponsored by the producers of Navigate EdTech and organizers of USA EdTech, a hub for U.S. participation in global edtech events.
Most EdTech companies that consider international expansion make the same first move: they buy a booth at a major overseas conference, send two people, and see what happens. Sometimes it works, but all too often companies come home with interesting new chocolate, some magnets, and not much else. Showing up without context, relationships, or market intelligence is expensive guesswork, while the companies that expand successfully treat global conferences not as the strategy itself, but as a concentrated deployment point within a longer term plan.
