Pre & Post Corona Virus Period
Corona Virus or COVID 19 has not only confined people at home but teaching the greatest lesson ever thought to mankind. The world is full of resources for its inhabitants for careful utilization, apart from the humans, the rest of the inhabitants on the planet knew the rules of the game. We, humans, were driven by the consistently aroused greed, accumulating or maximizing the very narrowly defined concept of wealth with no respect whatsoever to the nature which everyone’s very survival depends upon, embraced as DEVELOPMENT.
Vegetables, Fish, meat, and groceries are starting to deliver to the doorsteps with the highest quality and freshness at a reasonable price by the SME business more consistently, and successfully in every corner of the village, a town while large cooperations of supermarkets struggling to cater their very loyal customers. Social media platforms are used for the greater good for the first time in history by people starting to create various public groups to help each other to find the business, places to buy their essential needs and share information for their very survival. Online teaching platforms are blossoming, realizing the application of technology for ease, convenience, efficiency and resource utilization. The momentum of ‘working from home is gaining, realizing the unexplored mechanism for business owners to contain their overhead costs, avoiding the largest cost component of ‘fuel and transport cost’, electrify bills, water bills, rents,..list go on. People start to get along with their very family of husband, wife & their own children which used to escape by throwing in into ‘daycare centres’ and sneak into ‘busy office tables. Most new-age children enjoy the longest time with their parents after they are born.
All those things tell us the emergence of the new social, economic & political system which echoes the true meaning of ‘Sustainability’ as defined by the World Commission on Environment Development in 1987 ‘Triple Bottom line approach’ or sustainable goals with the pillars of Social, Economic & Environmental (Albert,2019).
According to ‘Basu, Banerjee and Sweeny, (2013)’ Frugal Innovations carry a much deeper meaning than the notion of ‘cheapness or affordability’ instead address the essence of the problem where ten (10) core competencies direct the true novelty of innovations which has the great potential to be the innovation mechanism in ‘post corona’ era.
SMEs do require to pay special attention to their business strategies for sustainable development as the business case are not similar to the larger firms. Sustainable development is nothing more than being vigilant about the well-being of their community and natural resources, thus, each SME should have a strategic plan for their business in order to become a sustainable business entity (Stubblefield Loucks, Martens and Cho, 2010). This tells blatantly that SMEs are the business models of the future.
Humanity started to realize that they were trapped at a very low level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs over the centuries while the apex of the pyramid has a far greater meaning which helps to ultimate freedom. Therefore, we, as academics, professionals and even laymen start to wake up to the fact that the ‘pre-Corona system’ has already gone down never to return, but the‘ post corona system’ will have full of hope and opportunities which modern civilization has never experienced.
This article was written in response to Prof.Nalin Abeysekara’s article published in Sunday Times FT
(http://www.ft.lk/columns/COVID-19-crisis-Model-of-learning-creativity-and-innovation-for business/4699498?fbclid=IwAR3BfLnlgZlQbC4SMJBzTlHOT1Hv5XYViQH2v21A_CL_jm7uNetFSQMcE8#.Xqo7IPagGy0.facebook.)
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