IP Profile of Biggest for-profit companies in EM-K12

Research Questions

• How is the market distributed?
• Where are they located? Are there any incentives for specific locations?
• Correlate them with their main outputs
• Understand and identify cases where these companies are “experimenting” or “adopting” commons-based approaches
• Identify these cases and treat them as entities that will also be placed in our mapping device (the quadrants)
• Identify what companies are the “Microsofts” of the field and what companies are the “IBMs” of the field

Market profile

The textbook sector is concentrated in four big publishing companies that have absorbed dozens of independent textbook companies, through mergers and acquisitions. Many have become brand names inside large companies.

• Mc-Graw-Hill
  • Public traded at the New York Stock Exchange
  • Absorbed: Macmillan, Merrill, and Glencoe
  • Product lines: long history in business and technical publications and databases. It also owns elhi, college, and testing lines as well as Standard & Poor’s and Business Week.
  • Business strategy: interested in extending its global English-language franchise

• Pearson
  • Public traded at the New York Stock Exchange
  • Absorbed: Prentice-Hall, Silver Burdett, Ginn, Addison Wesley, Longman, and Scott Foresman
  • Product lines:

• Reed Elsevier
  • Public traded at the New York Stock Exchange
  • Controls Harcourt
    • Harcourt has absorbed: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
  • Product lines:

Houghton Mifflin

• • Owned by a consortium of private eaquity groups (Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital, and Blackstone Group)
  • 4 biggest
  • Absorbed: D.C. Heath and Mc Dougal Littell
  • Product lines:

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