About
Why We Saw What Others Couldn’t
Who We Are
WebStudy Foundation was co-founded by Gisele Larose and Curt Corbi. Gisele brought direct career experience from both the employer side and the educator side of workforce development, the exact divide most alignment efforts fail to bridge.
Both are edTech investors, giving WebStudy Foundation an operator’s and a funder’s view of what’s needed for systems to change. WebStudy Foundation is not a data firm or a survey vendor. It is a nonprofit solution shop founded on Christensen’s Theory of Disruptive Innovation. We partnered with Todd Erickson of Collaboration Arts to structure a process that shifts diverse, cross-sector communication toward action.
The Insight
No single organization sees the whole system. Employers see one piece. Educators see another. Workforce boards, economic developers, and funders each see a different slice. Each perspective is valuable. None is complete.
The smarter you are within your vantage point, the more convincing your partial view feels. That’s what makes the problem so persistent and so invisible to the people closest to it.
WebStudy Foundation was built by people who’d stood on enough sides of this problem to finally see it whole.
We don’t facilitate conversations about alignment. We design the conditions that make alignment possible.
The Partnership
To build a solution worthy of the problem, we turned to Todd Erickson, principal of Collaboration Arts, the rare practitioner who had spent two decades designing the kind of cross-sector dialogue most organizations only attempt once. His work has been influenced by Lenny Lind, co-author with Karl Danskin of Virtuous Meetings.
Built as a Solution Shop
WebStudy Foundation is a nonprofit solution shop, a business model Clayton Christensen described as an organization built to diagnose and recommend solutions to complex, unstructured problems. We bring different perspectives together into one coordinated approach, rather than running things from the outside the way a traditional consulting firm does.
We’re disruptive in one specific way: our virtual model makes real, participatory decision-making affordable for regions that couldn’t otherwise arrange it. These are the same regions now working to reach the workers and learners the traditional system has overlooked.
How It Works
The challenges in front of us are too great to rely on conferences and sage-on-stage meeting formats. WebStudy Foundation enables educators and employers to turn silos into systems, region by region.
