A lot has already been said about the virus. Some observers call it once a century event, while others relate the pandemic with the four horsemen of the Bible as the harbingers of gloom and doom.
However, there has never been a cloud that the sun didn’t shine through!
Forward-looking enterprises are showing the much-needed grit and determination of a professional boxer in these times. Having taken the COVID punch right on their chin and briefly taken aback, they are now getting up, ready to fight another round.
Clearly, some sectors would live more dangerously than others. Response model of the businesses would be different depending on their capabilities, relative market positions, values at risk, and liquidity considerations. Companies in hospitality, real estate, airlines, and leisure travel are almost sure to face the worst of the horsemen. At the same time, those in the areas of insurance, pharmaceutical, and online food delivery may escape with just a slap on the wrist.
However, there is a section of business that is most likely to make lemonade out of this COVID lemon. They are the innovators of NextGen services, especially in the areas of IoT and AR/VR. Especially IoT, with its core capability to sense, collect and connect systems or things will act as a glue among different technologies.
From a philosophical point of view, it is unfair to be opportunistic given such an event. That said, there is an urgent need for the digital community to contribute to remote healthcare, contactless patient monitoring, social distancing discipline, drone-based delivery, agriculture, facial recognition, and kick-starting the manufacturing ecosystem. Organizations should utilize opportunities to their advantage.
Leading organizations are doing their bit by opening up their infrastructure (M&M) by giving out assets/IPs free for use during this period (PTC) and declaring an exclusive innovation fund (Intel) among others.
A crisis is a lady pregnant with opportunities. Didn’t the East Asian crisis give birth to Alibaba in China, the Y2K put the Indian IT on a global pedestal, and demonetization came as a jaw-dropping event for the mobile wallet Cos such as Paytm?