The Covid-19 pandemic has brought much of the globe to a standstill, pushing whole sectors to the edge of collapse. While many people have dusted off the puzzle boxes and board games and are using compulsory lockdown to catch up with friends through social media, innovators are using this down time to reflect on how things could be done better or differently. That’s the message from The Wall Street Journal, which reminds us that enforced breaks have facilitated many advances for humankind – from creating space for Sir Isaac Newton to develop world-changing ideas to tinkering time for Apple tech whizz Steve Wozniak, who has done some of his best work at home. While many businesses will never recover from the shattering effects of the Covid-19 containment measures, others will emerge at the other side much better placed to thrive and be competitive. This is already being seen in the BizNews portfolio, with global tech companies ensuring its resilience amid extreme volatility in the markets. – Jackie Cameron
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Innovate from your couch
By now you may have read about how Isaac Newton, while sheltering in place during the 1665 closure of the University of Cambridge for the bubonic plague, used his free time to discover gravity and invent calculus. And how during the closing of London theatres due to plague in 1606, William Shakespeare had nothing better to do and wrote “King Lear” and “Macbeth.” Those guys didn’t even have Wi-Fi. You do, plus extra time. Be productive.
Most of us work with our nose to the grindstone: developing drugs, selling homes, marketing gluten-free potato chips, restocking toilet-paper shelves, prescribing blood-pressure medicine, teaching calculus, manufacturing respirators – heck, even knocking out weekly columns. We rarely come up for air and ask if there is a better way of doing all this. Many jobs have long been ripe for disruption, and now they’re being upended in real time. Productivity – doing the right things the right way -is progress, is wealth creation, is what pays for government stimulus. Actually, economic growth is the sum of each of our productivity stories.
How to find it? Well, I’m a sucker for origin stories (except those involving apocryphal fruit, like Newton’s apple and Washington’s cherry tree). So much discovery and product creation happen away from work, when you have absolutely nothing better to do. The mind wanders, problems are puzzled over, and ideas start popping into your head, often in the strangest places and times.
Google famously instituted “20% time,” which let employees spend a fifth of their time on personal projects that benefited Google. But by 2015 only 10% of employees used their 20% time. Former Googler Marissa Mayer claimed it was more like 120% time. Too bad.
In 1993 I helped take public Avid Technology, which created early digital video-editing tools, initially on super-fast but expensive workstations costing $25,000 to $50,000. After seeing demos, Apple had sent Avid a few prototypes of its new Macintosh model and helped the company port software to cheaper Macs. But it was too slow, which is why no one else was editing video on personal computers.
One of Avid’s co-founders, engineer Eric Peters, told me he was home sick for a few weeks around then. He took apart the Mac II, studied its bus signals, and figured out how to cheat the operating system, getting enough bandwidth between the processor and the graphic-card slots to edit video. Avid dramatically lowered costs for TV and film production and had the market to itself for years.
In 2007 Travis Kalanick, having just sold a company, was “between assignments,” as they call joblessness in Silicon Valley. Sitting around bored with his friend Garrett Camp, they brainstormed cool business ideas. “Let’s go buy 10 Mercedes S-Classes, let’s go hire 20 drivers, let’s get parking garages and let’s make it so us and 100 friends could push a button and an S-Class would roll up, for only us,” Mr. Kalanick told me. “This wasn’t about building a huge company, this was about us and our hundred friends being baller in SF.” Nonetheless, Uber was born.
That reminds me of a story Steve Wozniak told me about the Apple I. He had the Basic computer language working on it, but every time he powered up he had to load it by typing a few thousand 8-bit hexadecimal numbers. So he created a $75 cassette-player interface, but couldn’t finish it until he was home and had extra time to sit down and write the needed code. Last week I emailed him for more details. In what may be the ultimate case of cosmic irony, he responded: “My computer only stays up for a few minutes and the replacement had a 2-3 week delivery time.” What? Someone please deliver Woz a new machine. Innovation awaits.
Here’s a shortlist of what the next Wozniak, Kalanick or Newton might work on during this lockdown: Design 3-D printed parts for ventilators and other medical equipment to prepare for the next epidemic. Adapt for home use the polymerase chain reaction tests that identify RNA signatures found in a virus. Research how to create a vaccine in weeks using DNA fragments. Code to simplify sharing of videoconference notes. Get telemedicine right. Plan online learning with real interactive discussions.
Remote-operated factories. Direct-to consumer-sales. Virtual travel. More-efficient mail and package delivery. Machine learning, maybe using Google’s TensorFlow, for early warning of future virus outbreaks. And someone please fix health-care record interoperability, sorely absent in this crisis.
Most exciting are new waves of productivity not yet imaginable. Like it or not, we have this forced lull. I know your mind is wandering, solving critical real-world puzzles. What are you fixing? Email me your coronavirus lockdown productivity story, big or small. First prize: a box of Cracker Jack.
– Write to [email protected].
