Black swan events, such as pandemics, change the trajectory of history and can lead to tremendous innovations. With the Covid-19 crisis front and center, entrepreneurs and inventors are suddenly united by a singular purpose: to bring forth innovative solutions to COVID-19 and the other problems stemming from isolation and need to care for the ailing.

Here are a few recent examples of innovation

JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers successfully delivered autonomous robot vehicles to deliver food, medicine and other supplies in Wuhan. By rapidly addressing previous last mile issues with autonomous vehicles in the wild, JD.com also delivered over 100 million masks over a 3 day period.

Coming together to address supply chain issues – Formlabs is mobilizing its community of users to deploy nearly 1,000 printers to quickly mass-produce these swabs as well as other important personal protective equipment (PPE). A single print can produce 300 test swabs at a time enabling Formlabs to produce 75,000-150,000 swabs per day.

British vacuum-cleaner giant Dyson Inc. designed the CoVent ventilator in 10 days and is one of several industrial heavyweights committing to make thousands of them. The Health-Tech giant, Medtronic decided to share its Ventilator design on open source to encourage manufacturers to design and build them faster.

Leon M. is using his 3D printers to make face shield PPEs for his local health care community. Leon posted on LinkedIn “Continuing further my learnings into 3D printing. Here is around 50 face shields ready to be used by our nurse volunteers. The little green sticks that you see are the “ear savers” basically instead of putting a surgical mask over your ears and have to chafe where ultimately after wearing a mask for a shift you can’t sleep on either side, you wrap the bands over these on the back of you head. They give you three options of “comfort”.

Articles about innovations driven by the COVID-19 crisis

• World Economic Forum – These new gadgets were designed to fight COVID-19
• Wall Street Journal – Crisis Has Jump-Started America’s Innovation Engine. What Took So Long? United by a singular purpose and freed from bureaucratic restraints, traditional companies like Ford are suddenly more nimble
• RAND Blog – The COVID-19 Crisis Has Sparked Innovation and Offers Lessons We Must Not Forget
• John Deere US – COVID-19 Innovations Center | Innovating in the battle against COVID-19
• Industry Week: Tale of COVID-19: Crisis Inspiring Innovations
• Entrepreneur : COVID-19 Will Fuel the Next Wave of Innovation – This global pandemic will shape businesses for decades to come.
• Forbes – COVID-19 Reminds Us Why Innovation Is Often A Public Good