Answer:
As the challenges associated with the coronavirus pandemic mount, there is no shortage of innovative entrepreneurs who have stepped up to help. During March and April 2020 alone, virtual Covid-19-innovation competitions (aka hackathons) drew in tens of thousands of participants from 175 countries.
From the Atlanta high school student who started an organization delivering free meals to front line hospital workers, to a group of Colombian engineers building low-cost ventilators from scratch, innovators worldwide are creating novel solutions to the problems caused by the pandemic. And many are looking to turn their Covid-19 inspired innovations into sustainable businesses that will continue on past the immediate crisis.
As an entrepreneur who co-founded, built, and sold a mission-driven company, and a professor of social enterprise and global health at Emory University, I’d suggest that today’s Covid-19-inspired innovators take four key steps if they want to turn that project into a viable business for the long term.
1. Determine whether your innovation is addressing a long-term problem.
The best innovations are created in response to specific, urgent, and sizeable problems. In some ways, the Covid-19 crisis has made our most urgent problems and their potential solutions more obvious. For example: Health care providers needed masks; production facilities were idle; workers were furloughed and needed jobs. A social enterprise could address all three of these urgent problems simultaneously: Train workers to make masks in underused production facilities for health care providers.
But will this cluster of problems still need your solution three to five years from now?
Some coronavirus-inspired entrepreneurs are building on existing trends that have been amplified and accelerated by the pandemic, such as the explosive growth in telehealth, remote patient monitoring and the use of AI in health care. One MIT Covid-19 Challenge winner, for example, built a model to track the national distribution of critical medical supplies for hospitals in highest need. The efficient distribution of healthcare supplies is obviously an urgent problem today, but even beyond the current crisis, will be of value to healthcare systems that need to reduce waste and lower costs. On the other hand, some Covid-19 inspired organizations have been established in response to problems that are urgent and important today but are unlikely to be as critical once circumstances change. Free meal delivery services that were started to help health care workers may fall into this second category.
In order to determine whether your new product or service is addressing a long-term or short-term problem, I recommend that entrepreneurs start by looking to the past. Construct a market-opportunity analysis using data from 2019 and earlier. Was the problem you are addressing now a problem then? And, if so, how big was it? Next, list what specifically changed with the emergence of Covid-19 that created or amplified this problem and the need for your innovation.
For example, the need to care for patients from a distance, a problem solved by telehealth and remote-patient monitoring, certainly existed prior 2020. What changed with Covid-19 were the widespread stay-at-home orders, more widely available video and home-based technologies and, in the case of telehealth, changes in regulations and reimbursement, which, together, have led to a tremendous demand for these services.
2. Identify your long-term market.
The next step is projecting whether there will be a large, passionate market for your product or service in a post-Covid future. Research conducted by CB Insights prior to the pandemic found that a lack of market demand was the most common reason for failed startups’ demise, with 42% of companies citing it as a contributing cause.
I came close to becoming a member of the “failed-startup-founder club” myself 20 years ago when I relinquished tenure at a top university to co-found an early digital health company. Our mission was to build an online health resource for Latin America. Soon after we incorporated, however, we realized that there were only a couple million Spanish-speaking consumers online at the time — a market too small to build a viable business around. On top of that, we made another mistake common to rookie entrepreneurs: We were too focused on the technology, and not enough on the customer.
User-centered design has taught us that a key to building a lasting business is having a deep understanding of who your customers are and how your product or
