Market Trend
Prior to the global virus infection that has impacted the world, there was a long term trend for businesses to increase their activity online, and enable workers and teams to collaborate and work from remote (home) locations. This was not only increasing in Western-style economies but in economies where physical distances between people were significant.
Pandemic Impact
There will be a significant acceleration of this trend. Indeed if one looks back at the 9/11 impact on world travel and travel in general, that incident greatly increased the desire for companies and employees to work more remotely. The current crisis, by comparison, is existential and has forced business and their employees to work online or configure their business to be able to work online in the immediate short term.
The pandemic is also going to generate huge levels of unemployment not seen since the dotcom crash and financial crashes of the early ’90s. In fact, the unemployment levels will dwarf these. Already in the USA 10 million workers have been laid off in a two week period and stands at nearly 13% of the workforce, the worst level since the great depression of the 1930s.
Post Pandemic Trends
All businesses and government departments will move to models that embrace remote and digital working. Even those businesses that have traditionally been conducted face to face (such as tourism, and leisure in general), will embrace aspects of conducting their business online. For example, keep fit classes have worked well in a lockdown situation.
As such companies will be looking for online solutions to enable them to conduct all aspects of their business, from back-office work to front line business delivery. To help facilitate that, in the UK government will likely instigate significant investment in digital infrastructure, so as “fibre to the home” rather that fibre to a telephone cabinet (it will deliver consistent 100MG speeds to all the country) and nationwide rapid deployment of 5G mobile coverage. This will be done at the expense of traditional and expensive infrastructure projects, a prime example will be the cancelling of the Heathrow expansion, and possibly the cancelling of the HS2 high-speed train project.
At a national government, regional government and local government level there will be a huge push to lower levels of unemployment, and these bodies in the spirit of the post-pandemic trend will be keen to work with solutions that can simultaneously engage with companies (in particular SME’s) and education/training institutions on a large industrial scale whilst at the same time maintain or reduce their cost base. So online assessment, online platforms for companies etc. They will also want tools that will enable them to undertake real-time micro and macro analysis of the unemployment/employment market so that the solutions and programmes they are delivering to both companies and individuals (demand side) are perfectly optimised by the supply side of training and programmes of education.
Simultaneously the private sector in terms of recruitment, outplacement, coaching etc. will also be looking to totally revamp their business models to reflect the remote working of all their systems and staff. It is also very likely that large scale MNE’s will also adopt totally remote recruitment, assessment and HR practices wherever possible.
SMRT.bio Manchester Future
SMRT.bio and TGC (The Growth Company) need to urgently have a fully working model of the system deployed at the local level within a 3 month period. This will enable the JV to move forward and actively sell the platform and tools across the UK post-COVID 19, which as a pandemic will likely end with a 12 to 18 month period. However, all of the sectors and businesses mentioned above will within 3 to 6 months be looking at solutions that will take them forward post-COVID 19.
Critical activities
The goal is to set up the JV asap. There is a need to pitch our solution to the Business Growth Hub. There is a strong need to reach out to other regions asap.
