What We’ve Learned From
Reviewing 1,000+ COVID Innovations

Brought to you by the teams behind TrendWatching and Business of Purpose, COVID Innovations launched on 9 April 2020 to inspire businesses to innovate and help others during the COVID crisis. We presented ideas for you to run with: anything that could get your organizations going again, while also benefiting the societies and economies you’re part of.

Nearly 200,000 people from around the world have since visited covidinnovations.com, generating around 670,000 pageviews. Furthermore, we received over 500 innovation submissions through our website, and 100s more spottings via our two communities, tw:in and Business of Purpose. A huge thank-you for your contributions!

Now that we’re shifting our resources to a new and exciting space called Make→Shift, we wanted to share our key insights and learnings from reviewing over 1,000 COVID innovations. The website will, of course, still remain accessible at any time, indefinitely, and continue to help anyone looking to learn from inspiring innovations from around the world.

Common Traits of COVID Innovators:

Agile but Grounded in Purpose

COVID has led to drastic changes in our lives. It’s a new normal that requires adapting existing strategies or adopting new ones. And the same goes for products and services. Innovative businesses are demonstrating agile mindsets and pivoting to new strategies and domains while staying true to their core purpose.

US company Paranoid Fan pivoted from helping sports fans find parking spots and get food delivered to their stadium seats, to supporting food banks in streamlining their logistics and delivery. It even rebranded itself as Nepjun.

Quick to Care

Innovators who entered the crisis with a purpose-driven mindset — or embraced one as it unfolded — are quicker and better at understanding challenges faced by their customers. This brings them closer to their communities and helps them introduce truly meaningful products and services.

Brazilian cleaning products brand VEJA launched an initiative to support Brazilian domestic workers — one of the company’s main customer groups — who lost work and income during the lockdown.

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Optimistic & Opportunity-Focused

Sudden, unprecedented events can (very understandably) lead to paralysis and defeatism, but innovators stay optimistic and focus on the opportunities that arise. They create space and permission for testing, for changing strategies, for introspection or for pushing efforts to adopt new technology.

While JetBlue paired with Imperfect Foods to sell surplus cheese and snack trays through an online grocery marketplace, United Airlines let nostalgic flyers order their signature in-flight stroopwafels for home delivery, and also shared stroopwafel recipes.

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Repurposing Resources

Using existing resources for a different purpose — often through unconventional partnerships — is another smart tactic employed by innovators during COVID. One option is to use a physical space in a novel way, for example turning an airport into a drive-in cinema, another is to find a new way to use a familiar item.

#SafeHandFish by Japanese companies Clear Electron, a maker of natural antibacterial agents, and Ohishiya, a manufacturer of soy sauce containers, repurposed those tiny plastic fish to package hand sanitizer.

Going Where the Attention Is

Where we spend most of our daily life has shifted drastically due to COVID. Innovators recognize that shift and adapt accordingly, following their customers and implementing new touchpoints within those spaces.

While couples spent more time together at home during COVID, the ‘Trojan Survey April 2020’ showed that only 19% of people were having more sex with their partners, while 37% were baking more instead. So Trojan Condoms created a cookbook called ‘Rising Time’ with 69 pages of sensual baking recipes and surprisingly suggestive bread photography.

Experimenting With New Ideas

A disrupted world and an uncertain future (while sounding very gloomy) also create a blank slate and permission to try crazy new ideas. Even if those ideas might not succeed in the end, they do drive a company’s innovative mindset.

Unilever Russia held a career fair in the format of an online game, where applicants could visit 8-bit versions of the company’s offices, learn job details and communicate with virtual representatives. Graduates were able to search for internships and job openings at Unilever, as well as virtually meet Unilever employees.