How to Compete in the Age of Moonshot Leadership and Exponential Organizations [#2]

Augmented Business Accelerated by the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

The current digital maturation has been a key factor in the fight against the clock against COVID-19. The number of doctors who consult online has tripled since 2018, while 40% of doctors consulted online or used digital platforms during the crisis. Numerous chatbots have been developed to speed up and automate the diagnosis of patients and provide them information through AI. As of May 20, websites that monitored important innovations related to the virus had globally accounted for some 900 active projects with high viability potential, 430 of them in the area of treatments and vaccines, and the rest in prevention, diagnosis, support initiatives, information, and adapting life and business. 

Just as the Spanish Flu of 1918 signified the launch of the pharmaceutical industry, COVID-19 will boost the biotechnology industry, with the AI digital transformation from “in vitro” to “in silico”. Collaborative research between teams from different countries and institutions using Internet cloud platforms, AI, supercomputers, and the latest biotechnologies have reduced development time in a way unimaginable months ago.

Just three months after China released the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence on January 10, a vaccine developed by the US biotech company Moderna (an MIT moonshot deep-tech startup founded in 2010) using this genetic information was shown to be efficacious and safe in its first trial in 45 volunteers and received approval for a second clinical trial in 600 volunteers. Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel165 commented that “thanks to the genetic information, a sample of the virus is placed in a machine in China that reads all the letters of its genetic code and the instructions for all the virus’ proteins. These instructions, being data, are sent over the Internet in a file that we open on our computer to design the vaccine and produce it at our factory in Boston”.

Large pharmaceutical companies also reacted quickly, taking advantage of the fact that regulatory bodies were relaxing the conditions to authorize human tests, and established alliances such as that of Sanofi and GSK to create a vaccine before 2021, or that of Biotest, BPL, LFB, Octapharma, CSL Behring and Takeda Pharmaceutical to develop a treatment based on plasma derivatives, forming the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which Microsoft also joined with its cloud AI digital solutions. The Spanish blood product company Grifols (third in the world in its sector) began collecting plasma from recovered patients in March 2020 to produce hyperimmune immunoglobulins and develop a rapid treatment against and diagnosis of the virus in collaboration with various US regulators, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Within just a few months, they were able to start clinical trials.

Companies from other industries reinvented themselves by entering the health sector, such as Apple, who integrated sensors and diagnostic applications into its future iPhones, or Fujifilm with its bid to develop and commercialize its medicine Avigan and to acquire pharmaceutical companies and the Hitachi imaging diagnostic division. According to investment analysts, “We are at the point where health tech, not office-documents, becomes the primary factor for Fujifilm’s valuation", something that will be true for many other companies.

Article excerpt from the book Journey of Future Enterprise

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Index of the Book

Part I: The Disruptive Change in Deep

1. An Insight into the Fourth Industrial Revolution 

2. The Paradigm Change

3. What Makes the Fourth Industrial Revolution Different? 

4. Cyber-Physical Systems: The Fusion of the Physical, Digital, and Biological Worlds 

Part II: Leadership and Organizations Leading the Change 

5. Moonshot Leadership for Massive Transformation

6. Exponential Organizations that Change the Game 

Part III: How Transform Organizations to compete in the Future

7. Strategy in the World of Exponential Change 

8. Three Basic Principles in Relation to the Future

9. Conclusion: Speed is the New Currency

Epilogue: Augmented Business Accelerated by the COVID-19 Pandemic 

? 2020 Jorge Calvo García | ? 2020 Libros de Cabecera S.L.