The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound impact on the lives of most of us. There is scarcely an activity that has not been affected in some way, and our professional life has been no exception. Many businesses have shut down, with many more having to drastically alter their operations to support social distancing or new patterns of consumer behavior.
Pre-covid, innovation folk would talk about the value a “burning platform” plays in driving lasting change, and for many businesses, this has been just such a burning platform. Firms have responded in a number of ways. For instance, many have successfully identified “low-hanging fruit” that can be rapidly and inexpensively implemented. Grocery stores installing shields for checkout staff, for example, or restaurants pivoting to takeout services.
Other sectors have seen more radical change. In education, there was a rapid shift towards online lecturing, with some jurisdictions even hosting exams virtually. Similarly, some retailers have begun experimenting with Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which allows customers to collect and pay for items without requiring a checkout service.
Indeed, new research from the University of Surrey highlights how robots could be rolled out in the hotel industry as the sector attempts to assure guests that their stay will not compromise social distancing requirements.
Digital transformation of healthcare
In few industries has the burning platform been quite so pronounced as in healthcare, and the transformation they’ve undertaken has been similarly significant.
The industry has traditionally been incredibly difficult for any startup to penetrate, and while the coronavirus pandemic has seen innovations rolled out at a scale seldom seen before, it will perhaps take a bit longer for its reputation for impregnability to be truly shifted.
A new report from EIT Health aims to uncover the state of the market across Europe, and especially the challenges startups still face in selling into the sector. The report was the product of several roundtable discussions conducted across Europe during 2019, with each roundtable aiming to provide clear and actionable recommendations to help improve the innovation pathway. While the discussions took place in a pre-covid world, the findings are nonetheless illustrative.
Unnecessary hurdles
For instance, entrepreneurs consistently grumbled about the often opaque regulatory requirements for digital health technologies, and the lack of involvement by all stakeholders in the crafting of these regulations. It’s a process that has almost vanished during the pandemic.
“Certainly the pandemic has spurred innovation and we’re delighted to see the adoption of some digital health solutions at a faster pace,” says Leslie Harris, Managing Director of EIT Health UK-Ireland. “Much of that is by sheer necessity. There’s not a lot of time for regulatory hurdles when frontline staff don’t have what they need and many of the innovations we’re hearing about are from NHS staff identifying an urgent need and doing their best to solve it. Within our own network, we’ve been hearing how the crisis has expediated the process of accessing the NHS and broader healthcare market for some EIT Health supported start-ups.”
Despite the roundtables advocating for a more cautious approach to ongoing evaluation, Harris also believes that the pandemic has resulted in a rapid acceptance of many new technologies.
“GPs that might have been reluctant to adopt telemedicine seem to have taken to it very quickly,” she says. “Similarly, other healthcare providers from within the NHS are utilising integrated healthcare platforms to maintain high quality care remotely. Once the efficiencies of these uses are appreciated, it’s hard to imagine them being abandoned completely.”
That’s not to say that the regulation of these technologies will vanish, but equally, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a mass retrenchment of technologies that have finally reached adoption at critical scale. The question is, has this process highlighted the importance of innovation, and indeed the unnecessary hurdles that are often placed in the way of innovation, such that the technologies of the future will find their way to the frontline faster?
Learning to forget
Tuck Business School’s Vijay Govindarajan underlines how important our ability to forget is to innovation. In his three box solution, a crucial element is for us to reassess the things we’ve always done, and stop doing many of them. This not only removes barriers to change, but frees up resources that can be better spent on transformation.
It’s a process that many of us are engaging in in our personal lives, as the rupture lockdown procedures have caused to our lives has forced us to assess what things we really need to do, and what we can do without when lockdown ends.
It’s a process memorably chronicled in This Idea Must Die, from the Edge Foundation, which is an anthology of leading scientists and thinkers, each of whom provide a single idea that they think is blocking progress in their particular field.
From physics to psychology, computing to mathematics, the book contains thoughts from some of the leading thinkers of our age. They each rile against an idea that has come to contain outsized importance in their field, and which must be destroyed for our minds to be free enough to explore afresh.
A force for good
Recent research from Columbia Business School provides a degree of optimism that the coronavirus crisis can produce some gains for society. It highlights that financial crises are not only destructive events, but also a source of great innovation. The authors remind us that the economic disruption is likely to force the creative destruction that was so memorably chronicled by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter as being the engine of invention and change.
The study focused specifically on the impact the Great Depression had on innovation in the United States, both in the short and long-term. The analysis found that in the short-term, the quantity of innovation decreased, especially among independent innovators, but that the quality increased.
This was largely due to the difficulty those independent inventors had in securing funding for their work, as the banks were in such a state of distress. Instead, the best inventors tended to be hired by firms with capital in the bank, with the period typified by a huge reallocation of talent.
The authors caution that if a similar retraction in finance is seen in the wake of the coronavirus recession, it might lead the best talent to jump ship to the Google’s and Amazon’s of the world, with a similar impact on the nature of innovation in the coming years.
It’s a reminder that while innovation is a fundamentally disruptive affair, the process of innovation itself can be disrupted. We’re already seeing the early signs of that in the initial months of the pandemic, and it’s a transformation that is likely to have significantly further to go yet.
