For the promise of learning technology to truly become reality for students and teachers, classrooms have to be equipped with the tools that fit their needs.

There are a lot of factors to finding the right match. One of the most important, we’ve found, is also one of the most overlooked – procurement. If it’s not your day job, it probably sounds pretty boring. It makes you think of bureaucracy and rules and everything that gets in the way of innovation.

But procurement matters. It’s the process for discovering, evaluating, and acquiring classroom tools and resources, and it’s key to how schools create teaching and learning environments, how developers decide on features and product improvements, and ultimately how innovations with impact are able to spread.

“Improving Ed-Tech Purchasing” is a new report from Digital Promise and the Education Industry Association that identifies the key obstacles and potential solutions for the procurement of K-12 personalized learning tools. The Johns Hopkins University Center for Research and Reform in Education surveyed district leaders, educators, and learning technology developers from across the country for this study, with a subset participating in in-depth interviews.