Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in the Pandemic and Beyond
By Daniel Isenberg, Ph.D. and Eric B. Schultz
The disruption caused by the exponential surge in COVID-19 infections and its far-reaching ripple effects is already causing an exponential surge in opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate. We believe this surge is going far beyond and will far outlast the immediate, devastating impact of the pandemic. To effectively address these opportunities, entrepreneurs need to understand five new, or greatly accelerated drivers that are fundamentally reshaping our post-corona world:
Safe separation. The word manufacturing means “made by hand” and at least until now, we have gone to doctors for our annual physical. The pandemic, however, is forcing us to abandon long-held assumption that physical proximity is essential, which in turn is generating new opportunities from manufacturing to medicine. New curbside diagnostics, for example, could become standard and further extend the reach of the recent urgent care clinic trend. Telemedicine is close behind, enabling doctors to safely reach into the home to give advice and frontline diagnostics, as PhysicianOne Urgent Care, for example, is rolling out its virtual visits throughout New York and Massachusetts.
There is no reason to think that these innovations will recede with the virus. Robots for delivering medical supplies, drawing blood , and removing waste, and drones for remotely detecting temperatures, will permanently free up healthcare workers for more professional tasks, increasing productivity while keeping them safe.
Contactless manufacturing technologies, such as Thruwave’s millimeter wave sensors which eliminate the need for logistics workers to touch boxes in order to inspect their contents, will discover that safe separation is another customer benefit and selling point.
Physically apart, yet socially together (PAST). In situations where both physical separation and social connection are important, PAST is already remaking traditional products and services. Witness the 20-fold explosion of Zoom usage and the 50-times monthly new-user registrations at competitor Lifesize. Already a popular messaging platform for enterprises, Slack has doubled its monthly customer acquisition rate in the last three months.
The innovation is in quality, not just quantity. Beyond this dramatic increase in usage, PAST demands are also driving the creative re-purposing of collaboration software. SABIS, with 75,000 students and 8000 employees in 20 countries, rapidly converted its global management system into a full-fledged e-learning platform, making even its kindergartens completely remote.
Consumer services of all kinds are responding to the need for new PAST offerings. Funeral homes are providing virtual services during the pandemic. Museums, e.g. the Smithsonian, shuttered because of the pandemic, are engaging their patrons with expanded offerings on social media, live streaming and virtual tours, and new immersive technology.
Flexible resilience. Entrepreneurs are tapping into structures and processes we have long assumed to be fixed in preparation for a new normal of agile response to accelerating pandemics, extreme weather, vicious forest fires and the like. Flexible resilience will drive changes in the planning and operations of organizations, and will open up opportunities for new forms of coordination and supply management. In a world where 94% of Fortune 1000 companies have seen disruptions to their supply chains, the need for flexibility is being met by companies such as FLEXE, which provides an on-demand warehousing service that has been able to rapidly “turn on” warehouse space to store medical equipment in pandemic hotspots.
LiveProcess[1], a leading hospital emergency management platform, has 500 hospitals throughout the United States using their platform for coordinating responses to COVID-19 and other disasters, by identifying and coordinating staff and critical resources such as ICUs. Use of their platform for messaging has tripled in the past month.
Home centrality. We are rapidly reimagining the home as a communications, command and control center capable of satisfying a much broader range of needs than previously conceived. One example is Tulu’s rental-in-place model, which creates in-building rental stations for apartment dwellers to safely and conveniently walk downstairs to rent a Dyson or a waffle maker instead of buying one. Due to demand, Tulu’s rental-in-place is naturally morphing into buying-in-place with an in-building store for purchasing goods (e.g. toilet paper). The home will also become a sanctuary capable of adapting to crises and supportive of PAST activities, including rapid (if temporary) conversion to office and homeschool space.
Network and cable TV, streaming services, and video games have all surged as people are required to shelter at home. Audible and Kindle have launched a free collection of audiobooks for children. CorePower Yoga is providing free online classes through its on-demand platform.
The implications of home centrality are not just about physical convenience and security, however, but also about mental well-being. “When home is everything all at once,” writes Megan Garber, “escape and confinement at the same time, its utility becomes more acute.”
Distributed knowledge. For anyone who thought that we had been over-saturated with information, think again. Already inundated by information overload, distributed knowledge is getting an even bigger boost as a result of the still-cresting pandemic. Distributed knowledge will impact how we get information, how we get educated and what education means for flexible employability of graduates, how governments govern, and how civic organizations (e.g. public health) operate. Education for work is also being distributed into our homes and out of schools and corporate training centers. The Canadian provider of online training platforms, Velsoft, has jumped from 10 daily customer demonstrations to 250 in the past month.
Entrepreneurs are already finding innovative ways to use massively distributed information reduce the impact of COVID-19: Breezometer’s crowd-sourced air quality data from over 400 million smartphones is helping the public make smarter decisions about how the virus may be spreading both indoors and out. Startup Gray Wolf Analytics’ newly launched SafeContact will allow agencies and governments, with citizen opt-in, to use to securely and privately track COVID-19 infections in specific regions.
These first efforts are only the harbingers of what is becoming a surge in innovation directed at the new and unexpected opportunities that are already evolving in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not a silver lining in the coronavirus cloud — but massive disruptions such as COVID-19 create chances for change and progress in parallel with the pain and suffering.
Daniel Isenberg, Ph.D. is a former professor at Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School (adjunct), author of Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Entrepreneur Create and Capture Extraordinary Value (2013, Harvard Business Review Press), and active investor in over a dozen technology startups.
Eric B. Schultz is the former CEO of Sensitech and author of Innovation on Tap, recently featured on the HBS Skydeck podcast.
[1] Disclosure — Daniel Isenberg is a minor shareholder in LiveProcess and Tulu.