It’s difficult to shed a positive light on the pandemic. Lives lost, economies struggling, people separated from their loved ones… and questionable national leadership. However, the pandemic has provided extraordinary examples of people’s ability to innovate under pressure. 

The most obvious example is the development of vaccines. The world’s largest vaccine makers, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Sanofi, all failed to produce a viable COVID-19 vaccine and were instead beaten to the punch by Moderna and BioNTech, both of which are startups. Why? Moderna and BioNTech eagerly and confidently pursued revolutionary mRNA technology. By contrast, the larger, more established pharmaceutical companies wanted to stick to their tried and tested methods, with the CEO of Merck stating that the notion of producing a vaccine in 12-18 months was “very aggressive”. Yet Moderna and BioNTech did just that through ruthless innovation. mRNA is now set to be the future of vaccine technology. How will the newfound speed with which we can create, approve, and produce a vaccine affect the future of medicine? What does this mean for the treatment and cure of other dreadful diseases?

Catastrophes like COVID-19 show us that it’s often urgency and ‘survive or die’ that gets things done; the innovations developed in the last year will prove to be game-changers in the future.

There are plenty everyday examples from the past year of how COVID-19 has provided fertile ground for rapid innovation and change. More flexible working has been a notion for years, and yet it took the necessity of COVID-19 to turn it into a reality for organisations which had never had to embrace working remotely. In Michigan, ER teams rigged ventilators with a second tube, allowing one machine to ventilate two patients at a time. A 31-year-old software engineer, upon realising how difficult vaccine-booking systems were in New York when trying to book an appointment for his mother, developed a new comprehensive system called TurboVax in just two weeks at a cost of $50, that is completely free for the general public to use.

In many ways this landscape of invention shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crisis the gig economy emerged, catering to people looking to use their static resources to make money and leaving us with Uber and Airbnb. Post-9/11, there was a rapid and radical overhaul of the way we design public spaces and huge advances in security technology. Crisis breeds innovation. 

Those businesses that remained committed to innovating during the 2008-09 financial crisis emerged stronger, on average outperforming competitors by more than 30%.

The question is how can we encourage businesses that are currently struggling under the economic pressure of COVID-19 to be bold? It’s essential for survival. Those businesses that remained committed to innovating during the financial crisis emerged stronger, on average outperforming competitors by more than 30% and continuing to deliver innovation in the following 3-5 years. McKinsey published a survey in June 2020; of 200 organisations across various industries, more than 90% of executives said they believed that the pandemic will change the way they conduct business for the next 5 years. However, only 21% said that they had the ability to actually pursue growth. Many businesses are currently just focusing on survival at a time when blue-sky thinking is the real lifeline.

Elon Musk said that “if you’re not failing you’re not innovating”. COVID-19 has separated the play-safe from the innovators, of which the vaccine story is the prime example. The innovation we have seen during the pandemic should provide us with hope, as it shows us what enormous problems humans and businesses are capable of solving in stressful circumstances. What questions are we currently sitting on that pressure will provide the answer to? One example could be climate change, the solutions for which are often presented as simultaneously essential and unachievable. Catastrophes like COVID-19 show us that it’s often urgency and ‘survive or die’ that gets things done; the innovations developed in the last year will prove to be game-changers in the future.