The post-COVID transformation of higher education created a new landscape of student, instructor, and administrator needs that McGraw-Hill's existing product portfolio was not fully equipped to address. The company needed a structured innovation pipeline framework to identify and prioritize the right opportunities for investment.
Vivaldi led qualitative research and segmentation to develop validated personas for students, instructors, and administrators — capturing post-COVID needs that differed significantly from pre-pandemic assumptions. Innovation sprint processes identified and pressure-tested new product and platform concepts against these personas.
McGraw-Hill received a five-year innovation roadmap anchored in validated research — providing the company with clear priorities for product development and platform investment across its education business.
McGraw-Hill partnered with Vivaldi to build a structured innovation pipeline that captured how student, instructor, and administrator needs shifted after the COVID-driven transformation of higher education. Vivaldi led qualitative research and segmentation to develop validated personas across all three audiences, then ran innovation sprints that produced a five-year roadmap anchored in research, giving McGraw-Hill clear priorities for product development and platform investment.
McGraw-Hill is a global learning company and one of the world’s leading providers of educational content, software, and services. Headquartered in New York City and founded in 1888, McGraw-Hill operates across K–12, higher education, and professional learning markets with a growing digital and platform-based product suite.
Vivaldi led qualitative research and segmentation to develop validated personas for students, instructors, and administrators, then used those personas to anchor innovation sprints that identified and pressure-tested new product and platform concepts. The work produced a five-year innovation roadmap that gave McGraw-Hill clear priorities for product development and platform investment across its education business.
The research focused on how each audience’s actual behavior, expectations, and pain points had shifted in the post-pandemic environment rather than relying on pre-2020 assumptions that no longer held. Each persona was built from primary qualitative work and refined against segmentation data, which is what made them usable as a pressure test for concepts rather than as a marketing artifact that gets cited once and ignored in product decisions.
The pandemic accelerated structural changes in how students engage with learning, how instructors design and deliver courses, and how administrators evaluate platforms, and those shifts have not reverted to the pre-pandemic baseline. An innovation framework built on pre-2020 assumptions about classroom dynamics, course duration, and student behavior would systematically misallocate investment, which is why a refreshed research foundation was the precondition for any credible multi-year roadmap.
A five-year horizon forces explicit choices about which themes the company is willing to invest behind even when the near-term metrics do not yet justify them, which is where most category-defining innovation actually originates. Annual planning tends to fund what is already working and starve what is uncertain, while a multi-year roadmap creates the institutional commitment to carry promising bets through the seasons of slow validation that precede commercial traction.
