Milla Wirén: “Creative organisations come out of crises as winners”

23.12.2020

In addition to human tragedy, the global corona crisis has been a significant disruption that has altered the course of development in many aspects in Finland, as well as out in the world. Disruption refers to a new innovation or phenomenon that functions as an incentive for extensive alterations in social, economic, or technological development.

– When we study these disruptions in the Laboratory of Business Disruption, we study first and foremost change and the powers that create change in our society, tells Research Manager Milla Wirén from Centre for Collaborative Research.

The corona crisis has brutally divided businesses into winners and losers. Parts of business life have lost all of their abilities to make profit, which applies to, for example, the event industry. It also appears that events are changing form. Now and in the future, there will be more so-called hybrid events that will be at least partially virtual. How this affects the whole event industry remains to be seen.

On the other hand, in many industries, the corona crisis has increased the demand for services and products. Many of the winners in business life in these exceptional times have been producing digital services. Moreover, several of the current disruptive phenomena are affiliated with digitalisation. One example of this is platform economy and courier service enabled by smart phone technology.

As is often the case with crises, the coronavirus pandemic has illuminated established attitudes and actions we normally do not identify in our everyday lives. In these situations, organisations have to adopt new methods of working.

– The Laboratory of Business Disruption is involved in an international project that examines ways to acknowledge the changing professional life in education and its development in schools of economics. I lead the task force that focuses on the future of work. The growing frequency of remote work has been discussed for a while now, but it has become reality only after the beginning of this on-going pandemic. The corona crisis has created a global remote work experiment. Soon, we will gain even more information on how remote work functions in different industries, and what pros or cons it has for the employer or the employee, states Wirén and continues:

– Those businesses and organisations that can separate the relevant from irrelevant in a crisis, and build a new creative business model to survive through the crisis, stand on solid ground once the crisis is over.

 

Text: Heikki Kettunen
Translation: Maija Siukonen
Photo: Hanna Oksanen

Created 23.12.2020 | Updated 23.12.2020