COVID-19 Will Fuel the Next Wave of Innovation

The three dimensions of impact

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

Longer-term innovation and changes in trends will come about as consumers and businesses try earnestly to normalize the impact on psychological and economic dimensions — provided containment is reached and the biological impact is resolved. Studying over 50 startups that gained scaled around the times of global crises via the lens of this framework clears the mist. To start off, a recession usually brings about an acceleration in business model change, driving down costs to serve and prices.

Supply chains will merge into resilient ecosystems

Global supply chains have long been geared towards keeping quality relatively constant while driving lower costs at every step. This has resulted in significant concentration risk in terms of geographies and vendors for most companies. For example, China scaling down due to Covid-19 and creating a knock-on supply impacts we are seeing today has exposed the lack of resilience in this approach. There is a sharp need for a more distributed, coordinated and trackable supply of components across multiple geographies and vendors while maintaining economies of scale.

Mental health support will be provided at scale, digitally

It is straight forward to predict that the Covid-19 is going to be an accelerant for remote working as well as online education.

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