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Special-Edition Viewpoints Address The Pandemic Crisis

May–June 2020

Dear Sponsor:

In the past few months, the coronavirus-disease-2019 (covid-19) pandemic has changed the world almost beyond recognition, and organizations around the globe are now grappling to understand both the near- and longer-term impacts and the actions they must take to thrive.

Pathways and opportunities in technology commercialization—the focus of Explorer—are undergoing transformations on many fronts as, for example, life-and-death policy decisions put AI modeling in the spotlight, the health sector attempts to accelerate vaccine development, remote-working tools face tests like never before, and dramatic declines in fossil-fuel prices affect the transition to clean energy.

In an effort to address Explorer clients' urgent need to understand the implications of these and other transformations, we are providing a special set of analyses about the covid-19 pandemic's impact on technology commercialization. These special analyses replace the standard May and June 2020 Viewpoints publications.

How Are These Viewpoints Different?

Because the developments we describe affect multiple technologies, we have organized our standard Technology Areas into six consequential technology domains (see list below).

  • The May 2020 documents identify a wide range of key forces that will likely have a major influence on prospects for the six technology domains, imagining a plausible range of alternative outcomes that these forces could have during the coming five to ten years. These outcomes serve as building blocks for creating effective responses to the pandemic.
  • The June 2020 documents provide a scenarios-based analysis for each of the six technology domains, with emphasis on how the key uncertain forces might interact and influence commercialization pathways in alternative postpandemic futures. Also available is a special presentation—The Pandemic Crisis: Scenarios for the Future of Technology Development—summarizing the scenarios and their implications for the six technology domains.

We encourage clients to engage with the May–Jun 2020 special-edition Viewpoints from all six domains to gain a broad view of potential changes and opportunities in technology commercialization. Please contact us if your organization does not already have access to all six technology domains; we will be happy to provide all Explorer sponsors with the full collection of special-edition articles.

Six Technology Domains

The six consequential technology domains and the Explorer Technology Areas they include follow:

We hope you will find these special analyses useful, and we are available to follow up with you on specific questions and discussion points that you may have. Thank you for your continuing support of the Explorer service.

Best regards,

Rob Edmonds
Explorer Director & Principal Consultant

Susan Leiby
Explorer Director & Principal Consultant