The corona crisis is accelerating the development of digital business models. On the other hand, it is destroying companies from all sectors of the economy at breathtaking speed.
Can you sit back and relax as a digital communication agency? Of course not. After all, digitalization of business processes only makes sense where there is business, i.e. production. Production is in decline. Airbus wants to cut production by 40% (as of July 2020), international supply chains are permanently interrupted. The tertiary sector - among others gastronomy, which employs far more people in Germany than the automotive industry, is affected: organizers, cinema operators, artists and cultural workers, not to mention education in general.
Hoping for digitization alone makes no sense. Service providers like us working a lot for public clients, will sooner or later experience the lower tax revenue in the form of smaller budgets.
Time for new thinking
"The calm" was one of the few pleasant side effects of the pandemic. Hardly any planes in the sky, less traffic in the cities, a return to the family. There are plenty of people who appreciate (d) this. As the protective measures continue, their acceptance decreases and conspiracy theories blossom. In addition to the many outrageous theses, there are also more likeable quasi-religious animistic explanations that "nature" strikes back.
In fact, in the middle of the crisis we are in, the question is whether we should continue to do business at the expense of nature. Corona is the result of a virus mutation. This mutation takes place when species meet that otherwise live at a distance from one another. With the pushing back of nature through urbanization and deforestation, exactly the latter happens. Like the smoking lung after quitting, nature recovered in no time. Starry night sky. Twittering birds. Seahorses in the otherwise diesel-contaminated canals of Venice.
Technically, many office workers had the pleasant experience that bosses trusted them and that home jobs became a matter of course. Coordination in the company or with customers via zoom even works more effectively than in pre-corona times. The fact that the bicycle industry is one of the few that is booming is a sign of an ecologically oriented mobility change. Environmentally harmful travel behaviour ("for 20 EUR to Mallorca") gives way to the realization that the holiday destination Germany is also quite beautiful.
Everything is remodelling, everything is reorganizing, and it comes to the realization that industries have to change. Car industry? A discontinued model in its current form. In Paris, Mme Anne Hidalgo was elected Mayor (again) in June 2020, who wants to make the metropolis of Paris completely car-free.
Post Corona Era
The calm of nature will not be imposed by poverty if industry, politics and consumers think together about opportunities for a ecological reconstruction. There are many approaches to this, from autonomous driving, which is being developed in Germany, to the use of other artificial assistance systems, the development of fuel cells, free public transport, such as in Luxembourg, to climate-friendly tourism.
If you need digital support for your future project, don’t hesitate to contact us.
