It is not a secret for anyone that there is an ongoing global pandemic these days. Covid-19 (or how most people call it, coronavirus) is spreading fast and kills many. Pretty much the entire world now tries to find a solution for it and some countries are claiming that they already did, or at least found a way to contain and control the virus. Of course, we are not medical or biology professionals by any stretch of the imagination, but everyone is aware of how catastrophic this pandemic is for the global economy and the effect it has on everyone’s lives. In this article, we are going to examine one of the possible ways to deal with Covid-19, what kind of problems it creates and some proposals to solve those.
As in any other innovation project, first, we need to understand the current situation.
Fortunately, today’s unfortunate situation is quite clear (see: https://covid19info.live/), and I want to reiterate what we said before:
A lot of people are getting rapidly infected across the world and many die as a result of complications.
Or, in our terms, what are the disadvantages of this situation?
Well, this part can be easy and complicated at the same time.
First of all, disadvantages can vary between different people and different contexts. For example, most of the countries put very clear restrictions in place. So, for somebody, the biggest annoyance is the fact that he can’t go to a local bar with his friends after work. Others complain that they are tired of being stuck with kids the whole day every day for the same reason. A large portion of the population is worried about the financial future. And the list is endless.
On the other hand, we need to determine what is the most important disadvantage. What is the single most important problem we want to concentrate on and eventually solve? That is often a much harder task.
For the purpose of this article, we want to concentrate on what we think are the most painful questions:
This phase in problem-solving and innovation is by far the most important. Before we jump into any solutions, proposals or ideas, we must understand what is the actual problem that we are planning to solve. Without a clear problem statement, we don’t have a clear target. As a result, the only thing that we can do is “shout out” random ideas (brainstorm). These might be great ideas but without a problem statement, they are not necessarily getting us any closer to the solution.
Despite what I just said, for this particular case, I want to invert the standard process and start with the proposed solution. Then we will analyze and try to solve those problems that it creates.
Of course, Herd Immunity was examined by more than one and, as far as I understand, even adopted by a number of countries. Others like the UK have dropped this idea. The main concern with this approach is that is will overwhelm the health system and eventually lead to even more deaths. This is definitely true. If the population continues with regular lives, the infection will spread uncontrollably, and the potential outcome is terrifying.
The other option is to create a “controlled herd immunity”. This of it as controlled release of medications. Why not “releasing” small groups of people at a time to develop immunity? The groups might be geographical areas, for example. This way we can control who is out there to catch the virus (assuming that we can define well enough the high-risk population). And the health system will not be overwhelmed, so anyone who needs special care will get it.
Many might say, but this is far from an ideal solution and creates other problems. And they will be absolutely correct. As I mentioned above, we want to concentrate on two of these problems:
Now, that we have clearly defined the problems, we can get to the actual work. We want to solve the two problems that I mentioned above and we want to do it with the help of the PRIZ Innovation Platform. But before we do that, I’d like to highlight two points:
For both problems, we followed a similar process.
Given the data that we already have, including the assumptions, is enough to build a contradiction. This means that we can use the Inventive Principles tool to break the contradiction.
Then we ranked the ideas that we generated from the previous step to decide what are the most important or most impactful options. And for that, we used Round Robin Ranking.
A small side note though, in this article we are not going to describe in details the entire process. Instead, we will jump into the solutions (or ideas) which we generated.
The first problem that we decided to tackle is that the proposed controlled herd immunity will take an extremely long time. The goal of this exercise is to find a way how we can make the process faster without creating a higher risk situation.
For many people, this problem seems to be much more critical than the chance of getting infected. Countries and companies are definitely concerned about the financial future more than anything else. The following solutions are targetting the economics crises problem.
As the last step, we ranked all the ideas that we generated from both analyses. For simplicity, I want to highlight only the top-ranked ones and just mention what ended up being not important at all.
These two are targeting the financial crisis that the world is facing as a result of the pandemic. But, if we give it a bit more thought, these solutions boost the chance of ending the pandemic in a more effective way.
In this exercise, we analyzed the possible solutions for two major problems that the world currently concerned with: how fast the Covid-19 pandemic can be resolved and now much it will eventually cost.
As a result, we proved again, that especially in such a crisis, money allocation is critical. With the right investments, the pandemic and financial crisis can be averted safely and efficiently.
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