How COVID19 will fuel the next wave of innovation?

With the coronavirus crisis, we are already seeing early signs of changes in the behavior of consumers and businesses. Remote working is being enhanced by tech and non-tech organizations alike, airline profitability is getting impacted by low seat occupancy, supply chains are getting fractured internationally, and retail shops are running out of dry items, ibuprofen, and toilet paper en masse.

Some of these changes are direct, short-term responses to the pandemic and will come back to normal levels once COVID-19 is turned off. However, some of these shifts will go on, creating a significant digital disruption that will shape brands for an extended period of time.

The three dimensions of impact

Pandemics have a direct impact on psychological, biological, and economic dimensions. Its intensity differs depending on the mortality and morbidity rate of the pathogen at hand, as well as the time period it takes for it to become a big one.

For the coronavirus, the biological impact has been quick to intensify and has been the toughest problem for older people. The psychological effect can be observed in the stock industry around the globe – traders are under-confident about the next time as the information on this crisis and its impact on worldwide productivity is at best incomplete and, at worse, incorrect.

The worldwide population is also experiencing psychological impact, with low morale and more isolation as human communication and freedom to go anywhere are getting massively decreased. Last but not least, the economic impact has been considerable. 

In the short term, the supply of daily used items has been disrupted, and the requirement for various things and services have dropped off. If this continues, this pandemic could very well affect international GDP negatively.

• Supply chains will merge into resilient ecosystems

International supply chains have long been geared towards maintaining quality relatively constant while pursuing lower prices at every step. This has resulted in considerable concentration risk in terms of geographies and vendors for almost all organizations.

For example, China is going down due to the crisis, and creating knock-on supply impacts we are experiencing today has unbarred the lack of resilience in this approach. 

There is an essential need for a more distributed, coordinated, and trackable supply of elements across various geographies and vendors while keeping scale’s economies.

This would require international platforms to be activated that utilize sophisticated technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 5G, blockchain, robotics, and IoT to help link multiple shoppers with various vendors reliably across a collection of supply chains. 

This will also have a knock-on effect on the adoption of self-driving cars and supply drones as the requirement for eCommerce logistics will far outstrip the number of drivers required to fulfill them.

The usual B2B platform suspects such as Ali Baba and Amazon are likely to move forward and compete for the ownership of this more sophisticated supply chain ecosystem in the coming years.

• Digital bureaucracies will become mainstream

The pandemic has raised government bureaucracies to spin into action faster than ever before. China broke records by building a 645,000 sq. ft hospital in just ten days in Wuhan.

South Korea drove quick testing of over 200,000 of its people and utilized android phones to track the movement of the infected — alerting the non-infected of those movements via real-time updates. 

All of these activities, as well as transparency of biological impact, could have been increased if there were more smart cities across the globe. According to the latest research by the University of Glasgow, only 27 out of 5,500 large-sized cities are the leaders in this field.

As governments’ experience from the COVID-19, it will migrate investment in favor of smart cities as it would be essential to have them to exceptionally handle the next black swan event.

Prime players benefiting from this migration in gears would be smart authorities, focused organizations such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Siemens as well as digital city startups across European countries and the USA.

• Mental health support will be offered at scale, digitally

It is straightforward to judge that the pandemic is going to be an accelerant for remote working as well as online learning. What is more difficult to find is what will happen once a majority of the knowledge workforce needs to perform together remotely, indefinitely. 

This migration will likely impact the morale, productivity, and mental health of employees throughout the world, and industries need to prepare for it.

For organizations looking to include human effort digitally to their workplace, there are limited choices today — with Humu, a startup developed by ex-google HR chief Laszlo Bock, being in pole position to capitalize on this.

A handful of other giant organizations, such as Automattic and Github, which run predominately on a remote collaboration structure, can also opt to productize their insights and capabilities to provide support to other agencies.

For employees working remotely, things are looking much more amazing. Various mental health beginners, such as Brave and Moment Pebble, can double down on resolving the isolation issue. In contrast, business networking applications such as Ripple can help resolve the mentoring and development obstacles that come with being a remote employer.

Final takeaway

The coronavirus pandemic is a terrible attack on the worldwide economy and has affected thousands of workers and families. Organizations in the immediate term need to ensure that the health and safety of its employees, partners, and suppliers come first.

Over the longer term, the crisis has irrevocably changed the process businesses will compete over the next coming years. Organizations like RavStack that choose to capitalize on these underlying changes will succeed, and the firms that don’t will get disrupted.

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