We need to innovate our way out of this crisis

At the dawn of the American Revolution, Lisbon was one of the richest cities in the world. In 1755, an earthquake that caused a fire destroyed Lisbon. Amsterdam and London displaced Portugal’s trading empire.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world economy and brought America to a grinding halt. But, like any large machine, the U.S. and global economies will need an orderly restart to get humming again. We will recover from this, but economic patterns have changed. And localities that identify these changes and innovate to address emergent challenges will be the ones that prosper. As we reopen the economy, what lessons will we learn, and how will we retool to make the Pacific Northwest economic region even more vibrant than it once was?

Phase One: Health Security

First, we need to stop the spread of COVID-19. It appears that social distancing is working to do this. However, we cannot go on too much longer. We need to develop a plan that reopens the economy in a safe way and in a way that minimized downstream health and economic problems.

Phase Two: Economic Restoration

We will not be able to go back to work as normal. Key to economic restoration is keeping producers and industry functioning. This will make it easier to supporting adjacent businesses (e.g. suppliers, shops, restaurants, and small businesses that cater to anchor industry workers) get back on their feet. We need to get the region exporting again.

Phase Three: Economic Retooling

The crisis has uncovered gaps, vulnerabilities and strengths. To effectively retool, we need adjust to the emerging reality by adopting lessons from this crisis related to economic resilience; attracting external investment to support rebuilding the regional economy; and investing government spending smartly to maximize value.

Phase Four: Creating the New Normal

To position the region beyond this crisis, we need to harness innovation to challenge industry to address the gaps globally, and export capabilities that leverage policy and technology to build fault-tolerant industries; address existing inequities in the economy that are vulnerabilities during a crisis; build redundancy into essential industries; and position the Pacific Northwest to be a global economic leader in the emerging next economy.

Unexpected Successes

What has gone wrong has been extensively covered; but there have been some unexpected successes that we would like to highlight, as they inform how innovation will help us recover.

· Industry 4.0 – The trend toward increasing automation in manufacturing has resulted in job losses. However, in an age of social distancing, this has proven to be vital for production.

· Delivery services – E-commerce platforms like Amazon and delivery services like GrubHub were developed for consumer convenience. During this crisis, they are essential services.

· Web Conferencing – One of the stars of the quarantine was web conferencing services. Services that were built to support global outsourcing and remote team collaboration have been redeployed to for children in virtual school, telemedicine and even online benefit concerts. Novel applications of virtual reality for virtual conferences and remote whiteboarding sessions show promise that we can progress even further.

Recommendations

We cannot let this crisis destroy the Pacific Northwest economy like the Lisbon fire brought down the Portuguese Empire. We need to bring industry and government across the region to work in tandem. The following initiatives will help the Pacific Northwest emerge from this crisis stronger than we entered it:

· Cross-sector industry/government collaboration: Public-private partnerships that develop common repositories for policies, procedures and training related to health security, but that also identify gaps vulnerabilities and emergent threats.

· Government focus on identification of risks to health, security and economy and they should challenge industry to address.

· Challenge-based investment in emerging industries, such as: labor-safe automation, redundancy in supply chains, autonomy for food security.

Together we will build a stronger region, but we need to do this smartly.

Sen. Mia Costello and Nirav Desai are the Pacific Northwest Economic Region Innovation Working Group Co-chairs. Sen. Costello represents Alaska’s District K and Mr. Desai is CEO of Moonbeam. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of PNWER.

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