Investing in imagined digital futures: the techno-financial ‘futuring’ of edtech investors in higher education

ABSTRACT Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in techno-financial ‘futuring’ practices. We identify two kinds of futuring practices. First, investors’ imaginary practices produce qualitative ‘fictional expectations’ about the future of education, supported by quantitative financial valuation practices that predict the monetary returns on investment available from funding edtech. Second, we analyse the specific investment-supporting operations of edtech investors, highlighting how imagined futures of education are funded into existence (or not) as investors select and support edtech products or services. In these ways, imaginaries of the future may be materialised in educational institutions through financial investments in specific edtech products. We particularly trace how investment imaginaries and operations shift from edtech markets as selling commodities to edtech industry controlling digital products and resources as assets. Therefore, the two identified complementary futuring practices function as processes of ‘assetisation’, aimed at turning educational services and resources into digital assets with calculable future value for edtech investors.


Introduction
Financial investment in educational technology ('edtech') has become increasingly influential in shaping the future of higher education (HE). Since 2010, venture capital investing in edtech has grown significantly, and accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic as spending on edtech by universities to support online teaching rose rapidly. The education market intelligence platform HolonIQ calculated that 'EdTech started the decade with $500 m of Venture Capital investments in 2010 and finished 14× higher at $7B in 2019' (HolonIQ, 2020). It later estimated investment in edtech at $16B in 2020 alone, describing it as 'funding backing a vision to transform how the world learns' (HolonIQ, 2021), rising to more than $20B a year later (HolonIQ, 2022). Typifying the conventions of quantitative finance, HolonIQ demonstrates how edtech investors are both captivated by rising numerical market indicators and by transformative 'visions' of the future of education.
The concern of edtech investors is to calculate the projected future digital share in global spending on education, and to invest in companies with products predicted to generate high future earnings. As in the finance industry more generally, 'the return on investment (ROI) is what matters most' (Chiapello & Walter, 2016, p. 157). Rising edtech investment and spending in HE are linked to long-term 'marketisation' (Komljenovic & Robertson, 2016) and recent rapid 'digitalisation' and 'datafication' (Williamson, 2021). During Covid-19 disruptions, markets for digital platforms surged as vendors sought sales to support online education during campus closures (Teräs et al., 2020), amplifying existing trends towards 'unbundling' HE services to digital contractors (Ivancheva et al., 2020), increasing penetration of private for-profit digital providers (Perrotta, 2021;Robertson, 2019), and reshaping the HE sector along neoliberal, market-based models (Holmwood & Marcuello Servós, 2019). However, edtech investing is also linked to broader changes in the digital economy (Komljenovic, 2022). The focus in the digital economy under 'technoscientific capitalism' is less on the sale and exchange of commodities for immediate market gain than on the ownership and control of digital assets with perpetual economic benefits in the future, without an immediate sale (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). In other words, what matters most is who owns and controls digital platforms, content that is shared, digital user data that is collected, and associated copy or intellectual property rights (Sadowski, 2020), which can all be attributed 'return-yielding' potential as 'expected future cashflows' (Golka, 2021, p. 89). Delivering and organising HE via digital assets with long-term financial yields is an enticing new source of future value for edtech investors, and embeds HE in the new modes of technoscientific value generation in the digital economy.
Edtech investing in pursuit of ROI from new digital assets is inherently futureoriented. Financial calculations are accompanied by transformative 'visions' of how education could or should be. Investors focus on allocating funds to companies with products that are expected to produce that imagined future while generating shareholder value. They invest in unique 'digital forms of education' (Decuypere et al., 2021), speculatively financing imagined models of teaching and learning to make those forms durable and, ideally, produce future earnings for both themselves and the investee. The investor's concern with prospective ROI, based on complex combinations of quantitative techno-financial forecasting and speculative imaginings, is thus transforming HE into 'objects of investment, prone to producing returns in the future' (Muniesa & Doganova, 2020, p. 97). As expected returns in the future are believed to derive from the 'asset form' (Birch & Muniesa, 2020), edtech investors are therefore concerned with identifying companies providing services and resources within the education sector that might be turned into digital assets with value to be capitalised upon in the future (Komljenovic, 2021). Investment in digital assets with long-term future value rather than commodities with immediate market value is thus an increasingly relevant route to capitalisation in education. Therefore, edtech investing may have profoundly political consequences for the ownership and control of the means of teaching, learning, administration and management in education. Investors are at the forefront of establishing the 'asset form' as a new source of value in HE, an effort requiring not only financial foresight but the discursive construction of educational futures.
In this article, we examine the imagined futures and actual investment-related operations of edtech investors in HE, through a case study of the UK-based investor Emerge Education (EE). EE was founded in 2013 and quickly positioned itself as 'the most active European investor in education', claiming 'deep education sector insights' and 'knowledge of the education market' to help edtech startups 'go to market faster' (https:// emerge.education/startups/). Its investment strategy focuses on funding 'Future Unicorns of Edtech' (Barosevcic, 2022), referring to companies valued more than $1billion. To secure ROI from future unicorns of edtech, EE operates strategically through techniques of 'futuring'. Futuring refers to the social and political practices that allow particular imagined futures to attract interest, produce consensus, foster investments, and animate present actions towards their realisation (Oomen et al., 2022). EE employs a range of techno-financial futuring techniques aimed both at embedding 'images of the future into the design of the present' (Oomen et al., 2022, p. 5) and extracting financial value from investing in those designs. As such, investors are highly significant and powerful actors in establishing a distinctive 'anticipatory regime' (Amsler & Facer, 2017) and 'sociotechnical imaginary' (Matthews, 2021) of the future of education, one in which education is not only intensively digitalised but also highly assetised as a route to capitalisation. Our interest is specifically in the imaginative discourses edtech investors deploy and the operations they enact to materialise their anticipated or expected futures around assets.
We focus first on the content of EE's imaginary visions, which appear as 'fictional expectations' or 'imaginaries of future states of the world and of causal relations that inform actors' decisions' (Beckert, 2016, p. 62); and second, examine its investment practices as specific operations of investor futuring that are both 'practical and consequential' (Muniesa et al., 2017, p. 14). The case study illuminates how edtech investors construct imagined futures and seek to materialise them in the present as both durable technological forms and revenue structures. Investors are significant actors because they imagine a future in which their investments will return value, and because their investment decisions ultimately determine what products and services are funded into existence or not (Feher, 2018). Investment, therefore, consists of political operations with productive effects on how the future unfolds (Muniesa et al., 2017). In the case of EE, the futuring practices include generating and circulating discourses and images of the future across the HE sector, thereby rendering its future visions as 'authoritative orientations for action' (Oomen et al., 2022, p. 7). Understood as generative practices of 'futurisation' that link 'the future to the present' (Tellmann, 2020, p. 346), its investment imaginaries and operations are becoming seemingly authoritative in the HE sector, embedded in policy proposals, and performed in the activities of sector agencies and universities themselves.
The overarching argument is that investors are seeking to enact a particular future form of HE through the conjoined futuring practices of financial imagination and the futuring operations of financial investment in edtech. These techniques of futuring are driven by the pursuit of financial ROI from holdings in edtech start-up companies, which are furthermore increasingly expected to construct digital assets or support asset realisation by others. This has significant consequences for the kinds of educational futures that might materialise. Investor futuring, therefore, constitutes a significant set of practices in the emerging assetisation of education, and in political struggles over the future of education.

Investor futuring
Our conceptual approach in the following analysis is informed by economic sociology, specifically by studies of the future-making practices involved in 'rendering financial futures actionable' (Tellmann, 2020, p. 345). We conceptualise investor futuring as the discourses and practices that edtech investors deploy to make particular educational futures actionable, rendering imagined futures into durable material forms with longterm impacts. Sociological studies on 'futures-in-the-making' suggest 'discursive constructions of the future are not simply imaginative' but 'thoroughly social practices' that 'are in turn implicated in forming certain materialities and with letting loose both intended and unintended consequences' (Tutton, 2017, p. 488). Likewise, recent work on investors in economic sociology has highlighted the role of imaginative, qualitative and discursive constructions of the future by investors besides the practical, technical and quantitative operations of capitalisation and valuation they enact to calculate future value (Beckert, 2016;Muniesa & Doganova, 2020). In the language of finance, 'capitalisation is about envisaging the value of something in terms of an investment', while valuation 'means assessing the expected future monetary return from investing in it' (Muniesa et al., 2017, pp. 11-12). An investor's primary concern is the expected shareholder value of the companies they finance, with their success not measured in the profits generated by the sale of goods and services they produce now, but in the capital gain (as ROI) resulting from its value in the future (Feher, 2018). Investors and entrepreneurs alike perform imaginative and practical work to ensure that the future unfolds in ways that make ROI most likely.
Edtech is a sector that has, over the past decade especially, been rapidly subjected to techno-financial forms of valuation and capitalisation based on investors' expectations of future earnings. These techno-financial forms of valuation and capitalisation are visible in the discourses and operations of edtech investors. While edtech investor futuring includes calculative techniques of financial expectation through the actual valuation of particular companies and their potential ROI, our focus is on imaginative interventions and the labour through which future imaginaries are performed into being (Oomen et al., 2022). Investors complement techno-financial valuation devices and practices of capitalisation with 'fictional expectations', representations and qualitative narratives of the future 'that show their convictions, beliefs, fears, and hopes' (Beckert, 2016, p. 133). Fictional expectations thereby establish particular cognitive and normative frames of reference that are necessary for motivating and coordinating economic action, opening up the future as a site of probabilistic value, potentially limitless possibilities, and profitable returns, while reducing perceptions of risk and financial loss.
These imaginative narratives are also powerfully persuasive transmitters of expectations to others. Their influence on decisions can cause events anticipated in the investors' narratives to transpire, so that in a performative sense, 'the outcome is merely the result of action motivated by a shared belief in an expectation' (Beckert, 2016, p. 84). Oomen et al. (2022) suggest 'techniques of futuring' as a framework to address questions of how particular imaginaries materialise. They foreground the agentic role of social actors as they engage in the politics of future-making, and describe futuring techniques as 'the identification, creation and dissemination of images of the future . . . through which actors come to share particular orientations for action' (Oomen et al., 2022, p. 3).
Through a range of distinctive futuring techniques, investors 'call futures into being, enact them and hence perform them' as they invest in the creation of durable material forms (Tellmann, 2020, p. 346).
One aspect of such futuring is the reimagining of education in terms of the creation of digital assets. Almost anything can be turned into an asset, from natural things, human skills and qualities, to technoscientific innovations and digital data, as they are rendered 'valuable and investable primarily due to the future revenues they bear' (Golka, 2021, p. 89). Assetisation is increasingly prominent form of economic coordination (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). We focus on assetisation because we understand edtech to be embedded in broader shifts in the global digital economy, where there is a focus on financial strategies of turning things into assets, that is, resources, services or data sources that can be constructed as property, bringing future and perpetual economic benefit through forms of economic rent (Sadowski, 2020). Following the shifting of the economy towards rentiership and assetisation, value is increasingly expected to be realised via the ownership and control of assets instead of the production and sale of commodities in the market (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). The investor's interest is not to invest in companies valued 'according to their price in the market today, but rather their capacity to "create value" tomorrow' as assets (Muniesa & Doganova, 2020, p. 102). In other words, companies capable of ROI to their shareholders in the future are increasingly expected to deliver this through constructing assets and charging rent for access and use of those assets.
Through the conceptual lens of investor futuring, then, we trace edtech investors' work towards assetisation as a process of reimagining and redefining specific educational services and resources as assets. If aspects of education are themselves turned into assets with capitalisable value, they are not only disaggregated into discrete services that can be fulfilled by edtech companies but they are disaggregated so that they stay under the ownership and control of the asset owner, who can generate value from both 'monetary rent and data rent' (Sadowski, 2020, p. 571). 'Unbundling' HE via a range of platforms, which charge subscription fees for access to educational services and resources (monetary rent), integrating together in cross-platform ecosystems, and deriving value from user data through the creation of derivative products (data rent), exemplifies how HE is undergoing assetisation (Komljenovic, 2021).
Investors' futuring techniques therefore function as concrete social practices through which future imaginaries may be performed into being, and which we see as critical practices of assetising education. As such, futuring constitutes a form of political action as well as an act of imaginative speculation, resonant with the ways assetisation is bound up in the 'political process' of 'narrating' and 'representing the future, both figuratively and politically' (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 315). Muniesa and Doganova (2020, p. 110) refer to the future-focused practices and discourses of investors as a 'financial imagination' that functions as a 'political technology' by allocating money to certain visions of the future while foreclosing other possible futures. The techno-financial valuations and fictional expectations of investors thus contribute to powerful and consequential decision-making, especially so when particular imaginaries become consensual visions that stakeholders as diverse as investors and entrepreneurs, education leaders and sector agencies believe in equally and seek to bring into material existence.

Futuring discourses
To undertake this analysis on investor futuring in edtech, we designed a documentary case study approach, focusing on the UK edtech investor EE. The rationale was two-fold. First, the UK HE sector is already highly marketised. Marketisation encompasses a range of diverse transformations to HE systems internationally, including metrics-based performance measurement and rankings, and substantial involvement of the private market in the key functions and services of public universities (Holmwood & Marcuello Servós, 2019). These forms of marketisation have extended into new digital education platforms and data-driven monitoring and intelligence (Williamson, 2019), and opened up valuable prospects for monetisation of digital assets, especially through the ownership and control of data that can generate value through new monetisation models (Komljenovic, 2022). Particularly, since the onset of Covid-19, 'digital transformation' has become a key policy agenda, with national governmental and sector agencies pursuing aims of improving quality, enhancing efficiency, and saving costs through digitalisation and datafication (Marmol Queralto, 2021). Edtech providers are thus being offered new market openings into HE internationally, whose investors are favourably positioned to benefit financially.
Second, EE has substantially worked on the UK digital transformation agenda, through multiple practices and techniques including partnerships with sector agencies, thought leadership on digital transformation of HE, and financial investment in startup edtech companies that share their vision of the digital future of education (Lynn-Matern, 2020). These activities are exemplified by its partnership with Jisc, an official national digital learning agency that provides technology services, consultancy, guidance and thought leadership on future technologies for UK HE. Jisc is largely funded by the government education department, HE regulatory agency, and UK funding councils, with additional subscriptions from HE institutions. EE is thus well networked with key HE stakeholders in the UK. It provides a rich exemplar through which to examine the role of investors in HE empirically and to conceptualise how particular techniques of investor futuring are deployed to imagine, speculate, calculate, evaluate and produce futures within the HE sector itself -although their desired outcomes are of course not guaranteed. It is precisely this micro-work that indicates the political struggles that edtech investors engage in when attempting to persuade others of their visions of the future.
Data collected to construct the case study included a large body of documentary material. We downloaded all pages of EE's website as of 25 March 2021, along with content written and published by EE staff on the Medium platform. The second part of the corpus included publications from its partnership with Jisc. We downloaded all the reports written by EE staff and co-published by EE and Jisc in 2020-21, plus the sections of Jisc's website detailing its partnership with EE. In total, we analysed 21 pages from the EE website, 5 pages from Jisc's website, 8 co-produced reports, supplemented with additional posts published on its Medium channel, Emerge Edtech Insights. The analytical strategy was informed by discourse analysis, involving thick description of the texts, the generation of themes and patterns across the corpus, and interpretation and explanation of their meanings, with a specific emphasis on identifying investors' imagined future visions and futuring practices from the discourse (Marmol Queralto, 2021;Matthews, 2021). Our approach to discourse analysis was inspired by sociological scholarship studying the discursive construction and enactment of futures, which focuses on how certain imagined futures are made legible, thinkable, and actionable through language and practice, and on how such discourses and actions might function performatively to 'lock in' the future to certain path dependencies and material arrangements (Oomen et al., 2022;Tutton, 2017).
We analysed the documents to identify the discourses and practices of investor futuring. First, to examine its fictional expectations, we analysed EE's discursive narration of future scenarios in a series of reports co-produced with Jisc, with a specific focus on its representation of HE in terms of assetisation. We highlighted and coded the distinctive discursive characteristics of the imaginaries and fictional expectations that surfaced across the sample of texts from EE and Jisc. Second, to understand its investment operations, we closely analysed the EE website, 'Manifesto' and other posts on its Medium channel, its investment portfolio, and a partnership program with Jisc, as specific futuring operations. Here, we focused on identifying EE's specific practical techniques of investment, which extend from funding individual investees to coordinating cross-sector network relations and forming collaborations with HE institutions. The analysis was also informed by our overall mapping of EE's social relations with other industry, policy, entrepreneurial and educational actors.
The presentation of the analysis that follows illuminates and conceptualises two key aspects of investor futuring -the discursive construction and circulation of distinctive imagined futures, and the deployment of specific operations of investment with the aim of materialising the imagined future -before a discussion of their political implications in terms of the assetisation of HE. While the imagined futures that investors project are never guaranteed to happen (Beckert, 2016), assetisation in the present remains profoundly political insofar as 'it is about who "owns" the future, and, more importantly, how they end up owning it and what that means for everyone else' (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 315). The following analysis of EE's investor futuring discourses and operations sheds light on how investors have set about the task of 'owning' the future of education, and what that means for the education sector itself.

Investment imaginaries
The imagined futures of EE are presented across the range of its textual products and the discourses they carry. These texts act as narrative 'techniques of futuring' (Oomen et al., 2022), and constitute 'fictional expectations' with potentially -but far from guaranteedperformative effects on how the future is enacted (Beckert, 2016). A key material transmitter of EE's investor imaginary is its 2020 report, produced with Jisc, 'The start of something big? Can edtech startups solve the biggest challenges faced by UK universities?' (Navas, 2020). The report narrates a series of priorities for HE digital transformation that edtech startups can support, such as learning analytics and personalised learning platforms; employability curricula; online learning and digital credentials; transforming digital infrastructure based on enterprise-wide cloud technology; and automating time-intensive tasks such as assessment (Navas, 2020, pp. 8-9).
Published by Jisc but authored by EE staff based on consultation with HE leaders, the report is part of a futuring series produced through 2020 and 2021, as part of a long-term partnership outlining a vision of HE in 2030 under the program theme 'Learning and Teaching Reimagined' (LTR). Announcing the LTR initiative, EE claimed: At Emerge and Jisc, we are working closely with our partners to deliver a comprehensive package of support for universities. . . . The purpose of this initiative is to create a roadmap for a digital shift in HE . . ., setting out the steps needed to harness digital technologies in addressing the biggest challenges facing the sector. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/canedtech-startups-help-universities-transition-new-normal-navas) Discourses of reimagining in LTR emphasise the distinctively imaginative expectations that investors must create to attract attention, and convincingly claim there is a current social problem that needs to be addressed, with entrepreneurs and investors best placed to resolve it. Indeed, the lead LTR report sets out a 'transformative' vision of a 'digital revolution' and 'the digital acceleration of higher education as a result of the coronavirus pandemic' (Maguire et al., 2020, p. 4).
The stage is set for assetisation of HE by the LTR program, as it identifies a vast range of activities and processes that could be reimagined as assets with tangible and longitudinal value -ranging from digital infrastructure and online learning platforms to new forms of curriculum, career-matched credentials, and automated assessment. Indeed, 'asset' appears repetitively as a discursive category in the corpus of texts, with the assetisation of digital services in HE figured as significantly transformative. A strategy framework for the digital transformation of universities by 2030, entitled 'Digital at the Core', recommends advancing innovative digital approaches to teaching and learning through investment in digital infrastructure, to enable 'universities to build on network aggregation effects of digital platforms to scale', and to treat 'digital' as 'a strategic asset' that will 'open up new ways of working and learning, and ultimately produce a clearer return on the investment' (Iosad, 2020, p. 7, italics added). Elsewhere, it highlights 'an ecosystem-based approach' to enable 'the consolidation of data' across multiple platforms and information systems (Iosad & Pauli, 2020b, p. 24). Digital infrastructure for innovative teaching and learning are treated by EE as objects of institutional investment with tangible ROI, in ways reflecting its own venture capital investment in startup investees providing those infrastructural services, and expectations of ROI deriving from those asset holdings. The representation of digital as a strategic asset with ROI highlights how EE imagines the future of HE in terms of assetisation. Imaginatively constructing digital products and resources as assets suggests certain forms of future asset value both for universities in terms of efficiency and cost savings and for investors in the edtech companies providing the digital infrastructure.
Likewise, digital data are represented as 'institutional assets' that can be extracted and capitalised on from 'intelligent information networks', which would 'enable highly personalised engagement with students and staff, individualised experiences, and actionable strategic intelligence', while creating 'entirely new value streams' (Iosad, 2020, pp. 32-33, italics added). The process of assetising institutional data imagined by EE positions users' digital traces as assets that can be subjected to valuation practices, mirroring the broader trend for platform businesses to assetise their users' personal data as future revenue streams (Birch et al., 2021). However, as in the platform industry more generally, the reports do not suggest how exactly student and staff data could represent a new value stream beyond talking about 'becoming a data-empowered organisation' importing 'data-driven' business models and 'design principles' from the likes of 'Netflix, Apple, or Uber' (Iosad, 2020, p. 35). The guiding principle here is a belief in the future value of data even without clarity on how its value might be calculated. Moreover, the discourse promotes copying practices from other digital businesses and sectors, such as Netflix and Uber. What is important here is the performative potential of the expectation of the value of data assets around which data collection, aggregation and control are structured (Beauvisage & Mellet, 2020). From the perspective of the assetisation of data, the data-empowered operations imagined by EE would need the innovator to control the aggregated and large amounts of user data, typically extracted from the activities of students and staff. User data could thus become assetised for the production of new derivative digital products and services, raising questions about who has access to and who controls user data. As another edtech entrepreneur put it, 'sometimes we launch products not for the revenue, but for the data . . . and we monetize the data through a different product' (as cited in Sadowski, 2020, p. 572).
EE imagines universities engaging in 'revenue diversification', which it characterises as a 'shift from the commercialisation of physical assets to new online offerings' (Navas et al., 2021, p. 12). Imagined as new digital assets, these online offerings would be protected with copyright. These forms of revenue diversification are imagined to address 'financial challenges and unlock significant growth through opening up new models and markets' (p. 7). For example, it recommends institutions 'commercialising "education IP" for other institutions' by licensing the curriculum content and course materials produced by educators (p. 34). While it is not unusual for UK universities to own their staff's teaching and learning outputs, such as video lectures or curriculum designs, it is not common that universities would profit from this IP by renting it out and charging various fees as economic rent. This is the model developed by commercial online learning platforms, which charge on-demand fees for students and institutions to access curriculum resources such as pre-recorded video and other materials. The idea of commercialising education in terms of IP highlights EE's reimagining of HE in terms of assetisation, by finding ways to turn existing (and new) things into assets. In this case, the curricular content produced by educators is advised to be treated as property that should be turned into an asset with value for institutions. The value is also realised for the platform owners (edtech companies) that might act as intermediaries and structure and organise the exchange with other institutions. And finally, the value is realised for investors as share owners in the invested companies.
EE further sets the scene for assetisation of HE with its emphasis on automated platforms to 'match' students to career destinations through new forms of digital credentials. These platforms would involve 'analytical insight into every step of the journey', and more 'tailored' forms of 'job discovery, application, feedback and development' (Iosad & Pauli, 2020a, p. 24), enabling employers to identify and target potential graduates through 'a "skills API" -a common way of sharing information about skills and competencies that closes the gap between the languages of academia and the workplace' (p. 26). The fictional construct of a 'skills API' enabling interoperable exchange of student data between universities and employers implies that students' credentials and competencies could become assetised data objects with value in each matching operation. Furthermore, EE encourages students to see themselves as micro-investors in their own futures, as skilled subjects with the measurably valuable human capital to be exchanged via the 'skills API' with employers' data systems. Thus, student data are imagined as assets with value to students and employers, but also to the platform operators as matching intermediaries enjoying longterm revenue streams from institutional and industry subscriptions to their services, and the potential to derive new services from the data.
The EE series of LTR reports for Jisc highlights how specific future imaginaries have been produced as a way of narrating and stabilising the future as a scenario in which HE is organised in terms of myriad potential assets for future value generation. The reports function collectively as a futuring technique by structuring and ordering particular imaginaries and rendering them possible to act on in the present (Oomen et al., 2022), potentially transforming the 'futures-in-the-making' constructed through discursive practices into durable long-term arrangements with material consequences (Tutton, 2017, p. 485). In other words, the investor imaginary of EE treats education as if an increasing array of HE services and functions may be opened up for assetisation. Whole infrastructure systems might be assetised, along with 'educational IP' produced by educators, and data flows captured about students' competencies, skills, and credentials, resulting in greater capitalisation potential for investors. Its fictional expectations highlight EE's futuring role in shaping the HE sector itself to align with its vision of digital transformation, and the assetisation potential for investors and investees that such transformation would entail. It attempts to actualise those imaginaries in practice through financial investment operations, to which we turn next.

Investment operations
The practical investment operations of EE need to be understood as specific techno-financial futuring operations that translate its imaginary into investment relations and financial contracts, with potentially performative effects on the HE sector. Focusing on its practical investment operations brings to light how edtech investors go about turning their imaginaries into capitalisation opportunities. In venture capital, investors and entrepreneurs have to translate 'a technology into something that makes sense in terms of future cash flows', that is, by considering it as an asset that can be capitalised (Muniesa et al., 2017, p. 21). Addressing edtech founders directly, for example, EE calls for 'more crazy, bold, big and unexplored new ideas' and encourages 'thinking "outside of the edtech box"' to 'set us up better for the 2030s' (Barosevcic, 2022). It is therefore searching out new investment prospects to deliver on its imagined future, by encouraging startups to identify fresh approaches to education, and new potential assets, that might be capitalised for long-term earnings.
EE identifies how it is operationalising its fictional expectations of HE in its Manifesto, which also functions as an investment thesis for its 'Emerge Fund 1' launched in 2020. In the Manifesto, EE co-founder Lynn-Matern (2020) focuses on 'engines of opportunity' which include 'Enablers' that 'work with existing HE institutions to help them become more scalable, flexible and industry-aligned', and 'Disruptors' that 'build standalone providers that compete with the incumbent institutions'. Enablers include, for example, 'employer-university collaboration platforms' and 'operating systems for teaching at scale', while the 'Disruptors' include 'online vocational schools' and 'challenger universities' that operate a 'digital-first' model of teaching. EE actively invests in edtech startups in each of these categories as a way of seeking to materialise its vision of the future -a fictional expectation of 'Education 4.0' to match 'Industry 4.0' (Lynn-Matern, 2020). Here, EE portrays a view of an all-encompassing change. It first includes transforming existing education practices by investing in edtech that targets established schools and universities. It supports them in changing practices and finding new markets or scaling services, and brings ideas on how to find and construct institutional assets for the future and perpetual income. Second, it includes investing in new providers of education that supports disaggregation of the sector. As such, EE ultimately exercises authority to decide on how the future of HE should unfold.
From our conceptual perspective of investor futuring, these categories demarcate novel potentials for assetisation by highlighting aspects of education that edtech might enter and transform, armed with investor funding. The most obvious form of capitalisation is through its direct investments in a portfolio of 'companies building the future of learning and work' (https://emerge.education/portfolio/#/). The portfolio addresses several of the 'disruptor' and 'enabler' themes listed in the Manifesto. For example, one is an online 'Learning Experience Platform' that works as an 'operating system for teaching at scale'. Another acts as an 'employer-university collaboration' platform, connecting 'leading companies and universities to deliver up-to-date, industry relevant programs'. It also funds 'vocational school' platforms that connect students to employers and mentors, and 'challenger universities' as competitors to established UK institutions. As the portfolio indicates, the future imaginary presented by EE is inseparable from its investment practices.
The operational process of seeking to assetise education is evident in the most significantly performative aspect of EE's operations, an initiative actively pairing universities to edtech startups run in partnership with Jisc. Organised by EE and Jisc from 2019 to 2022, Step Up aimed to be 'a collaborative community of edtech founders and education leaders . . . increasing innovation and supporting long term change in UK education' (https://stepup.jisc.ac.uk/). It was rebranded as 'the edtech programme' in 2022 (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/get-involved/edtech-programme), though our analysis focuses on previously collected Step Up documentation.
Step Up is significant in terms of investor futuring since it exemplifies the very practical operations and micro-work involved in engineering the conditions for startups to generate future cash flows. Not only does edtech investing involve the allocation of funding; it also involves the cultivation of longer-term relations between the investor and the investee, and ongoing efforts to create the appropriate conditions for investees to generate ROI for their investors. It highlights how investing takes place in specific scenarios, through particular performances, and through operations that include quantitative market assessments (Muniesa et al., 2017).
Step Up exemplified EE's practical operational attempts to measure 'product-market fit' (Walton, 2021) and ensure that their investees have 'potential to scale' (Newman, 2021), which constitute quantitative, techno-financial forms of valuation and futuring.
Designed explicitly to solve the problem of product-market fit and scalability for edtech startups, Step Up was based on an 'assessment process [that] provides a trusted and robust opportunity to filter, select and engage with the companies that will be the best fit' for participating universities (https://stepup.jisc.ac.uk/information/our-story/). Providing market information on edtech startups was a key aim of Step Up, which it delivered through a validation process leading to the award of badges for startups to use in business pitches to institutional customers. The criteria included: legal requirements, data and information security, business proposition and solution, evidence of working product, existing implementations and evaluations, evidence of impact/efficacy, validated pricing strategy, financial track record, execution ability for effective implementation, clear management structure, technical expertise, and evidence of scalability. Pedagogic benefits and questions of ethics were backgrounded by the assessment, reflecting the EE's strategic view that the HE system is too 'education-centric rather than employer-centric, designed with educational objectives in mind, rather than employer needs' (Lynn-Matern, 2020).
As such, the Step Up validation process acted as a specific form of valuation for the production of product-market fit information. The reports and badges provided to validated startups could then be used to order the edtech market via 'streamlined procurement' at HE institutions, gain access to personalised market advice and guidance, participate in exclusive events, receive discounts on key services, and gain competitive advantage over other companies (https://stepup.jisc.ac.uk/benefits/ ). One practical way it not only measured but engineered product-market fit was through actively partnering validated startups with universities. It aimed 'to transform higher and further education by matching edtech startups with colleges and universities to solve their biggest challenges' (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/the-top-20edtech-startups-ready-to-address-the-education-sectors-biggest-challenges-26-nov -2020). Relatedly, an 'Edtech Hotlist' showcased leading UK edtech startups from the program (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/get-involved/step-up-programme/edtech-hotlist). When Jisc and EE announced the 2020 Edtech Hotlist, 6 out of 20 companies included were already recipients of EE seed funding. The Hotlist thus further promoted EE's portfolio, serving to support the enactment of its investor imaginary and to guarantee the product-market fit and scalability of its investments.
Step Up operated as a very specific micro-practice of investor futuring, one which identified problems and challenges in the HE sector and then sought to apply validated digital solutions that might be controlled, scaled-up, and capitalised as future revenue streams. The value of edtech startups in the scheme had to be calculated in terms of their product-market prospects for scalability. It therefore highlights 'the empirical processes that make things valuable' and which 'reconfigure objects from the perspective of investors' (Golka, 2021, p. 89). It also reflects the ways an investor viewpoint has become the basis for assessing the societal value of technoscientific innovations, with investors seen as both technically and morally capable of appropriate allocation of economic resources (Chiapello, 2015).
Step Up therefore exemplifies the complex operations that edtech investors engage in to make imaginaries performative: they embed the financial imagination in durable technical and material forms, and in social and organisational arrangements, as a route to securing ROI from the beneficiaries of their funding. Through its various techniques and practices, operations and programs of futuring, EE exemplifies the performativity of investors' fictional expectations in rendering financialised futures 'actionable', 'durable' and 'actual' (Tellmann, 2020) in HE. However, the rebranding of Step Up in 2022 exemplifies the continuous struggles of actors in the labour of futuring, as they work to make their fictional expectations plausible and acceptable in the sector and beyond.
The investment thesis and portfolio of EE, plus its participation in Step Up, illuminate some of the practical operations of investor futuring. If the 'true value of an asset . . . stems from its capacity to create value' in the future (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 16), EE highlights the labour investors must put in to ensure that educational services become assets with future value, which also includes EE organising thought leadership forums, networking dinners, detailed opportunities for social learning, organising mentoring for entrepreneurs, and much more. Its investment thesis provokes the edtech industry to produce particular services with measurable product-market fit; its investment portfolio is constantly promoted and supported to achieve scalability; and it actively works with its investees to scale their businesses, work through funding rounds, and aim towards high-ROI targets. The 'true value' of an edtech asset is one that emerges from operations of investment that include creating the enabling conditions for it to become valuable.

Conclusion
In this article, we have examined the imaginary constructions of the future of HE and the practical investment operations of one edtech investment company, as a way of exploring and conceptualising the assetisation of education. We have offered the concept of 'investor futuring' to understand these two practical techniques of envisioning and enacting futures of education. EE is an important example from the edtech investment industry and has established strong network connections with other actors from the industry, finance, policy and education sectors. The headline conclusion from this analysis is that EE is doing the work of investor futuring by coordinating edtech, finance and policy towards a shared imaginary of the future of HE in 2030, and it is actively performing and actualising these futures in ways that are consequential to HE in the present. The images of the future it projects share characteristics of technological and economic determinism that infuse much 'futures' thinking in education, and are neither foreclosed nor uncontested inevitabilities (Amsler & Facer, 2017). However, despite the attenuated character of such imaginaries, investors remain powerful figures in education as they allocate substantial investment funds towards particular visions and the companies that are considered able to enact themultimately making decisions about what products exist or not, and thus what kind of educational futures are possible or not. EE is a compelling case of the futuring work that takes place across the edtech investment industry. Investor futuring is central in attempts to make certain imaginaries of HE come into being.
Through its construction of an investor imaginary, EE reimagines the education sector in terms of things that can be assetised, from university-wide information infrastructure and online learning platforms to the intellectual property of educators and the data generated by student and staff activities. Edtech investors like EE are thus working towards turning myriad educational things into assets that can generate value in the shape of monetary and data rents well into the future. Its investment operations constitute attempts to realise this imaginary, and to capitalise on possible new avenues of assetisation. Value capturing from future assets is promoted not only for investors but also for HE institutions and even individuals. As such, investors are becoming key catalysts of the assetisation of education, with implications that include institutions paying monetary rent to platforms, the generation of economic value from student and staff data including content, the increased integration of private platforms into university infrastructure, and even the de-institutionalising of education to alternative 'challenger' institutions. EE's investor imaginary and operations exemplify the push by investors towards these assetised forms of education.
Overall, investors such as EE are increasingly influential in HE by networking with key decision makers, connecting HE leaders with entrepreneurs, organising events, publishing reports with established agencies and offering advice, developing market ordering start-up accreditation guides, and more. Through fictional imaginaries and technofinancial investor futuring, they are defining a future that appears to be becoming consensually shared as an objective for current action across fields of finance, industry, education policy and leadership. These expectations are supported by techniques of quantitative finance and calculations of ROI, which guide investors' decision-making. Investment and all its constituent techno-financial instruments, professional knowledges, practices and processes, narratives and imaginaries are engaged in 'futures in the making', both by imagining futures and performing practices to make them durable and actual. In this sense, the 'financial imagination' of investors and their futuring practices function as a 'political technology which determines where money should go and what things should be' (Muniesa & Doganova, 2020, p. 110). The financial imagination of edtech investors determines what educational futures should be funded in the present and therefore what forms of education should be allowed to exist in the future. Edtech investors are seeking to identify ways in which an increasing range of services and activities in education can be turned into assets with calculable financial value in the future. These are profoundly political acts, which potentially cede ownership and control over the future of education to financial actors rather than educational actors, and suggest a future in which what matters most in education is whatever can be assetised as a route to ROI.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/T016299/1].

Notes on contributors
Ben Williamson is a Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh, the author of Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice, and an editor of Learning, Media and Technology. Janja Komljenovic is a Senior Lecturer of Higher Education at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on digital markets in higher education, new forms of value in educational technology and how things are turned into assets. Janja is published internationally on higher education policy, markets and education technology.