How IEGF helped BIOZONE

Considering applying for IEGF support? E-News caught up with IEGF recipient, Richard Allan, CEO of BIOZONE, at last year’s Edtech for Export conference in Wellington and found out how the co-funding grant helped them grow their business.

ENZ: What is BIOZONE?

BIOZONE International is a publishing house that specialises in the production of student and teacher resources for use in high school science programmes (grades 9-12) in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.  We also provide editions that are tailored to other international programmes, and BIOZONE books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Polish, and Slovenian, as well as specific English-language editions compiled for Italy. BIOZONE’s goal is to improve science education performance in schools across the world.

We produce a hybrid that’s part textbook, part study guide and part activity workbook all rolled into one. We use an infographic style of presenting information, with annotated diagrammatic explanations that have a lot of added value.  Our programme and pedagogical approach requires learners to apply what they’ve learned in a previous activity to a new situation, not merely recall data. It’s an enquiry-based approach.

I was a biology teacher for 11 years before I became a publisher, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s required for teachers and students to succeed in the classroom environment. 

ENZ: What has IEGF funding enabled you to do?

We’ve been successful in two IEGF rounds – one in 2014 and one in 2015. The first lot of funding enabled us to market our new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) series in the US before other publishers got up to speed. The NGSS provides students with internationally-benchmarked science education.

Being nimble and innovative is key to our success, and the grant meant we could significantly ramp up the number of state and national science teachers’ conferences we could attend. To give you an idea of the demand – at one conference in Los Angeles in December 2014 I had over 200 teachers trying to cram into a room that only had the capacity to hold 100 people, to hear my presentation.  They were sitting on the floor and around the edges of the room. That’s not untypical of what happened at other events, so we were obviously in the right place at the right time with the right product.

ENZ: And the second grant?

The second grant helped us enhance and improve our digital platform, and get it ready for commercial release. It made a huge difference in the timing of the launch and accelerated our development. 

ENZ: How’s business going?

It’s been hugely successful in our markets that, so far, include New Zealand, Australia, the US, and the UK.

The opportunity for BIOZONE in the US is with the NGSS. One of our customers is Stuyvesant High School in New York City.  It’s a very prestigious school, with 34,000 kids competing for 850 places, and they bought our entire programme, which is a huge accolade from them. 

We also won the ‘Best Supplemental Resource’ award for science, for the whole of US, at the education publishers’ ‘Content in Context’ conference in 2015 which was pretty cool. 

ENZ: Do you have any words of advice for educators new to working in the edtech space?

I think we should encourage our teachers to embrace education technology and provide them with the ability to upskill so they can use the tools. Many schools are already technologically savvy and are hungry for new ways of delivering curriculum using smart tools. 

For educational publishers the digital landscape is evolving rapidly, not only with new opportunities and competitor activity, but also in the way teachers are wanting to engage with digital delivery of content.