The CURVE

Like many 21st Century firms, Vertical Learning Curve (VLC) is a new company that exists because of the advent of technologies that did not exist a few years ago. VLC, however, is much older than its birth certificate would indicate. The current company and its key players have their roots in three previously successful ventures that extend back to the 1980s. The companies are Management Technologies International, Global Options, and Dunatos. MTI anticipated the growth of the China market and by 1987 was the largest American consulting and training firm specializing in helping western companies participate in what has become the marketplace phenomenon of the century. Global Options was a 1990s smaller version of MTI with a focus on Russia and Brazil, again specializing in business consulting and training. Dunatos was a 21st Century cousin of MTI and GO with a focus on using emerging technologies to improve business education and training.

VLC was formed in 2006 in response to the call by the American Federation of Scientists (and others) to take advantage of web, database, and virtual reality technologies to do something about the increasing costs and decreasing effectiveness of traditional classroom, lecture approaches to education and training. Applications in the military, surgery, flight simulation, Second Life.com and the gaming industry suggested that these new tools could, indeed, deliver greater bang for the buck. Early efforts at what has become traditional online education were less innovative and less encouraging than what the marketplace imagined, forced by entrenched tradition to not much more than pushing a classroom through a wire. Academics complained this type of education was simply an electronic version of the correspondence courses of the 1950s. The marketplace soon noticed that, as impossible as it might seem, traditional online education provided little if any improvement over the academic classroom and was initially actually more expensive.

For some years the corporate predecessors of VLC had been developing and testing technology enhanced, experiential learning methods at the graduate, undergraduate and corporate training levels. They created and marketed the first self-contained CD-Rom courses in Management, International Business and Strategy. They also created and distributed the first (and still only) web-based, real-time business simulation, called "Pillars." VLC still offers the CD-Rom packages and Pillars simulation for use at the undergraduate level.

VLC is a technology company that focuses its accumulated expertise and credentials in business and business training/education on (1) virtual-reality, experiential, accredited Graduate Programs and (2) customized training for US and large international companies, NGOs, and government.