How Will We Conquer COVID-19? Innovation—Delivered Through Projects

 

By Cyndee Miller

You don’t need me to tell you these are dark times. You’re probably stuck at home seeing the same dire headlines I am: The number of COVID-19 cases around the world has surpassed 1 million, with more than 64,000 deaths. And the end is nowhere in sight.

It’s overwhelming. Yet we human beings have a wonderful knack for pushing through. We’re seeing it every day as the global community delivers innovation—and hope—through an array of projects reimagining everything from supply chains to product design.

Just 72 hours after the French government issued a call for much-needed medical supplies, the CEO of French luxury group LVMH approved a project via text, according to The Financial Times, agreeing to transform three of its perfume and cosmetics factories to produce hand sanitizer free of charge for health authorities. Dyson—best known for vacuums and hair dryers—designed and built a ventilator in just 10 days, and the U.K. company is donating 15,000 to combat the global ventilator shortage.

Conquering COVID-19 can only happen with cross-disciplinary teamwork—reaching across organizational, political and geographic borders. Case in point: Chinese auto supplier BYD formed a task force of leaders from different business divisions and pulled in more than 3,000 engineers on R&D, design and processing. The result? A plant capable of generating 5 million masks and 300,000 bottles of disinfectant per day.

Virgin Orbit is collaborating with teams at the University of California Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin to build simple “bridge” ventilators that meet the needs of people who don’t necessarily need intensive care—and that can be quickly mass-produced. “I have never seen our team working harder. Never seen ideas moving quicker from design to prototype,” said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart in a statement.  

For all teams, agility has taken on an entirely new meaning. Industrial engineer Mat Bowtell founded Free 3D Hands to ensure access to prosthetic devices through 3-D printing. Now he’s pivoting the Australian org’s mission and using that same technology to produce free face shields. Design firm Carlo Ratti Associati and MIT’s Senseable City Lab are designing ICUs inside shipping containers, creating “plug-in biocontainment pods that can be quickly deployed in cities around the world.”

We’ve faced deadly epidemics and healthcare emergencies before, of course. And project leaders are putting those hard-won lessons to work. In Chicago, Illinois, USA, Rush University Medical Center is preparing to activate the emergency preparedness capabilities it baked into its design from the start. Built in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the hospital has the ability to surge capacity by 130 percent. To get ahead of the looming influx of COVID-19 patients, Rush has converted two units to negative pressure to prevent cross-contamination, and staff have already doubled the number of beds on two floors.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ranu Dhillon was on the front lines of the battle to contain Ebola in West Africa in 2014 and witnessed firsthand the unrelenting toll.

“In an epidemic, transmission is happening and it’s not caring about weekends, it’s not caring about holidays, it’s not caring about any other parts of life where we have momentary pauses,” Dr. Dhillon says on a recent episode of Projectified^™. “And it’s just going to keep going unless you build the system to counter it.”

Just as viruses vary, so do the responses. While in Guinea, Dr. Dhillon had full government support to acquire the necessary resources and push his containment project forward. That’s not always the case these days as leaders scramble to come together on a clear path.

“There may be certain things that are clear that you want to act on, but the pieces that have to be put into place, the players that have to be engaged in order to act in that manner, it’s really tough to sometimes align that with federal level, the state level and the local level,” he says.

But project leaders aren’t about to let a little bureaucracy get in the way of battling the coronavirus pandemic. After his own COVID-19 test came back negative, Dr. Dhillon rejoined the fight. And he’s not alone. Around the world, organizations big and small are flipping their scripts and launching whatever projects are needed in the new COVID-19 reality.

What projects do you see making a difference?