By Ivan Montiel, Leopoldo Gutierrez, & Ana Castillo

Three months ago, in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak and immediately after the Spanish government declared the state of emergency, we wrote the op-ed “Companies vs Coronavirus: A Call for Responsible Innovation” in which we called for rapid responsible innovation to combat COVID-19. This is defined as innovation developed in a short period of time in a state of emergency with the hope of protecting people and saving lives (Gutierrez, Castillo, and Montiel 2020). Following our initial call, things have moved very quickly, and we continue to track how innovation has mushroomed. We witnessed business responses take off and then evolve into a variety of initiatives. Today we provide a more extensive —but still incomplete— list of initiatives than the one we previously presented back in March; this time, the rapid responsible innovation is organized by stakeholder recipient of the innovation:

• Covid-19 patients: tele-medicine, production switched into medical supplies, and novel ventilator design.
• Health organizations: large venues (hotels, stadiums) turned into emergency hospitals, and innovative protective gear.
• Employees: telework, employee-sharing among companies, restructuring to avoid layoffs and secure paycheck, employee COVID-19 tracker apps, and social distancing workspaces.
• Customers: food and consumer good delivery apps, safety-oriented store redesign, zero-contact payment apps, and payment flexibility and moratorium.
• Small businesses: financial crowdfunding platforms to prevent closure.
• Communities: virtual entertainment, distance education and conferencing, online therapy and companionship services, and COVID-19 tele-detection and mapping software.

Based on the observations of the past three months, we venture to pin down three differential attributes of rapid responsible innovations:

• Immediate social impact: Responsible innovation seeks to alleviate environmental and/or social problems (Halme and Korpela, 2014). In the case of COVID-19, the positive social impact needs to be immediate to be effective. Examples include new emergency medical facilities to treat new cases and setting up of creative work policies that prevent massive layoffs.
• Radical organizational agility: The outbreak had urged companies to act under pressure, be flexible and adjust their core activities to respond to the outbreak. These fast responses benefitted from organizational agility to, for example, repurpose hotels into temporary hospitals, flip ride-hailing apps into delivery service apps and adapt manufacturing processes into making medical supplies.
• Novel stakeholder collaborations: Achieving the fast-positive impact requires collaboration with stakeholders in unprecedented ways. Stakeholders become sources of useful knowledge and information allowing to target the solution correctly and increase the possibility of success and acceptance (Chesbrough, 2020). Collaborations with suppliers, governments, and health institutions allowed for the development of a vast outreach and rapid logistics and distribution network to supply medical supplies.

These unprecedented business responses raise many questions for us to dive into. Rather than an organized set of research questions, below a rapid list, let’s say, a sub-product of our 2020 ruminations:

• Is rapid responsible innovation here to stay? How effective has it been at protecting people and saving lives? How is it affecting company reputation?
• Will companies continue to act and innovate rapidly while collaborating with relevant stakeholders to tackle other less fast-paced, but also urgent grand challenges, such as climate change, poverty, or any of the Sustainable Development Goals?
• What is to learn from the emerging “distance economy” based on protecting lives with the rapid digitalization of service delivery, tele-medicine, tele-therapy, online education and fitness, and even tele-work?
• And the bigger question: Will COVID-19 act as the fast-track accelerator towards a more stakeholder-centered economy?

In sum, businesses need to now evaluate whether the unprecedented COVID-19 stakeholder collaborations and rapid responsible innovations can also be applied to tackle other grand challenges such as climate change and inequality. Both business and society will only benefit in the long-term if they are able to remain engaged to maximize sustainable value for all stakeholders.

References

Chesbrough, H. (2020). To recover faster from Covid-19, open up: Managerial implications from an open innovation perspective. Industrial Marketing Management. In press.

Gutierrez, L., Castillo, A. and Montiel, I. (2020). Companies vs Coronavirus: A Call for Rapid Responsible Innovation. Covid-19 Insights from Business Sustainability Scholars. Organizations & Natural Environment, Academy of Management.  https://one.aom.org/covid-19-insights-from-business-sustainability-scholars

Halme, M. and Korpela, M. (2014). Responsible innovation toward sustainable development in small and medium-sized enterprises: A resource perspective. Business Strategy and the Environment, 23(8), 547-566.