Experts from Harvard Business School's Digital Initiative discuss how technology is helping leading companies gain an edge during the coronavirus pandemic.

COVID-19 has brought Great Depression-level unemployment to many economies and triggered imbalances of supply and demand as some businesses have needed to staff-up quickly. One private sector response, People + Work Connect, is a business-to-business personnel exchange platform active in more than 40 countries. The brainchild of corporate chief human resources officers at Accenture, Lincoln Financial, ServiceNow, and Verizon has signed up hundreds of businesses looking to place idled workers or fill open positions. Accenture’s Nicholas Whittall and Mary Kate Morley Ryan discuss the initiative.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a tidal wave of data. As countries and cities struggle to grab hold of the scope and scale of the problem, tech corporations and data aggregators have stepped up, filling the gap with dashboards scoring social distancing based on location data from mobile phone apps and cell towers, contact-tracing apps using geolocation services and Bluetooth, and modeling efforts to predict epidemic burden and hospital needs.

Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso see risk-mitigating innovation everywhere the virus spreads.

Contact tracing—mapping the spread of a virus by identifying individuals in the chain of transmission—is an essential tool in the fight to limit the damage of COVID-19. Early experience in South Korea, China, Singapore, Germany, and elsewhere has shown what works. Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics recently published a paper outlining how contact tracing can be designed to protect users’ privacy. Coauthor Sham Kakade, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, explains.

Post-COVID recovery will hinge on how well countries leverage talent. This lends new relevance to international business school INSEAD’s 2020 global ranking of that capacity. Released in January, the school’s seventh annual Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) weighs countries’—and major cities’—ability to attract, foster, and maintain talent. The 2020 GTCI focus on AI is also apt, given predictions that the coronavirus will speed trends like automation. Co-author Felipe Monteiro interpreted.

In Episode 3 of the COVID-19 Dispatch series, we talk to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, who recently wrote about contact tracing. In the fight against COVID-19, this critical public health tool has been used unevenly. Thompson notes that South Korea and Singapore have had success with smartphone apps, but that South Korea’s reliance on GPS, along with surveillance video and credit card transactions, raised privacy concerns and may have discouraged participation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a critical question: Why does the United States not have the capacity to manufacture many products for which there is a sudden urgent need — everything from critical care ventilators, N95 face masks, and personal protective equipment to everyday items like over-the-counter pain relievers? Of course, the United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse in many sectors, but it surprises many people that a huge number of everyday basic items have to be imported.

As workplaces mandate that employees work from home, universities shift fully to online teaching, restaurants transition to online ordering and delivery, and automakers shut down their plants, we’re seeing the most rapid organizational transformation in the history of the modern firm.

The coronavirus pandemic is expected to fundamentally change the way many organizations operate for the foreseeable future. As governments and businesses around the world tell those with symptoms to self-quarantine and everyone else to practice social distancing, remote work is our new reality.