A message about COVID-19 and entrepreneurship from Professor Khanna, May 2020:
Dear Learners,
In this course we often refer to "institutional voids" as a defining construct for understanding the promise and the perils of emerging markets. In just the past eight weeks, since the COVID-19 urgency hit home worldwide, I can point to plenty of examples where this construct has helped clarify my own thoughts about appropriate creative responses.
Most immediately, the airwaves in most countries are saturated with discussions about vaccines, and speculations about when these might arise. As those of you living in emerging markets will know, new vaccines – such as any for COVID-19 that might arise over time – almost never make it immediately to the less developed parts of the world. This problem of access has, however, been substantially alleviated by a fabulous example of organizational entrepreneurship: the world vaccine alliance, Gavi, is a platform created to do the "market making" that connects users and makers of vaccines in otherwise less-accessible locales. Gavi simply saves millions of lives extremely cost-effectively. This example relates to Lesson 1 in our course, "Characterizing the Context of Emerging Markets."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped start Gavi some 20 years ago, but you don't need to be a high-profile philanthropist to be an entrepreneur in addressing some part of the COVID ecosystem. There are of course innovations cropping up in diagnostics and refashioning medical equipment. There are also bootstrapped technology-wielding NGOs that are trying to make a meaningful impact through elementary analytics. One example is the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network co-founded by two of my colleagues, an epidemiologist and a medical doctor. This network provides daily situation reports on the state of social distancing to any policymaker who wishes it for her precise geographic area, along with access to expert local epidemiologists – gathered through a crowdsourcing method – to prevent data misinterpretation.
And on this last issue of the quality of information used to influence entrepreneurial action – an issue that shows up in frequently in the course, see this hot-off-the-presses blog post.
Stay safe and enjoy the course!
Professor Khanna