What happens when a 110-year-old “textbook company” decides it isn’t in the textbook business anymore?
That’s the question I put to Steve Brown, CEO of Nelson Education, one of Canada’s oldest and most recognizable names in learning. What I heard wasn’t another corporate transformation story—it was a reckoning. A company famous for paper and print decided to reinvent itself around people and purpose.
Steve describes the early realization with a grin: “We were a great bowl of vanilla.” Reliable. Familiar. But in a world changing this fast, reliable isn’t enough. So Nelson chose to self-disrupt, rebuild its leadership from the inside out, and bet on relevance as the key to rekindling teacher joy and student engagement. The result was Edwin—a digital learning ecosystem built to bring every resource, curriculum, and conversation into one trusted space.
From Vanilla to Vision
Nelson’s pivot wasn’t about chasing trends; it was about re-anchoring education in what matters. Steve talks about literacy and numeracy as non-negotiables—the foundation every learner deserves—but also about equity, empathy, and the courage to debate. “When students learn to question well and lead with understanding,” he says, “societies thrive.”
That vision goes well beyond classrooms. For Steve, the true measure of success is national: an uptick in creativity, confidence, and yes, GDP—driven by engaged, capable graduates ready to lead. His leadership philosophy mirrors that same horizon: pick a destination, accept that the route will change, and build a culture strong enough to hold the line when the work gets hard.
AI: Tool, Not Product
When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, Steve doesn’t flinch. “AI is a tool, not the product.” Instead of outsourcing to public models that hallucinate facts, Nelson built its own large language model—trained entirely on trusted, human-edited content. That decision protects teachers, accelerates product development, and moves personalized learning from buzzword to reality.
The Courage to Disrupt Yourself
Throughout our conversation, Steve keeps circling back to the human side of innovation: the courage to ask “why” five times, the grace to listen to skeptics, and what he calls “humble arrogance”—the belief that big bets are worth making, paired with the humility to learn when they don’t land perfectly.
For educators across Québec, there’s a quiet message in Nelson’s story. The same mindset that helped a century-old company reinvent itself can help us rethink our classrooms too. Stay curious. Question the defaults. Keep the purpose in view, even as the tools evolve.
If you care about modern learning, teacher time, and scaling what works without losing heart, this story’s a spark.
So—what would you disrupt first?
