Collaborative Contagion: A Case Study in Curriculum Development, Distribution, and Adoption

The collaborative contagion model is the culmination of a three-year project designed first to develop a curriculum in business ethics and entrepreneurship (BE&E), then to increase the adoption of that curriculum by leveraging professional educators' established networks. The development of a new curriculum, the collaborative portion of the program, was accomplished through a series of four-day, in-person disruptive innovation workshops (DIWs), after which educators continued their working relationships in a specially developed online community. To distribute this curriculum, we developed the contagion portion of the model, through which we encouraged and incentivized not only adoption of the curriculum on the part of the participants themselves, but also on the part of people in their broader networks. After our first year of workshops, 18 K-12 and 21 higher education participants helped formulate 10 modules and 60 grade-specific K-12 lesson plans. We have established pilot programs at 13 separate institutions, and built partnerships with seven organizations. These early results indicate that the collaborative contagion model is a viable, and potentially strong method by which curricular materials can be developed, and then disseminated to a broad audience.