By Cafer Tosun, Alyssa King, Axel Schultze
May 10, 2020
On Mother’s Day, May 10th, 2020, a total of 62 countries have made wearing a mask compulsory the one way or the other due to the corona virus. The total population of all the “mask” countries together stands at 5.67 billion people. This means we are well ahead with our initially targeted timetable. While the KnockOut 19 campaign supported generating awareness, it was more the necessity to contain the virus, which made the governments to impose wearing masks in public. And the insight that as long as there is no medicine or vaccination available to keep safe, wearing masks and keeping a distance are two effective measures to help contain the virus.
We have put together a list of all countries in which wearing a mask is recommended or made mandatory. And yet, there are still some countries missing in the list.
Please reach out to the World Innovations Forum, if you need support with convincing your government or with initiating a campaign in your country to wear a mask. We are more than happy to work with you to create the necessary awareness.
You can contact us at innovate.fighting.pandemics@wiforum.org
Use Hashtag #kout19
Please use it on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, WhatsApp, messenger – anywhere.
Thank you for your support and a happy Mother’s Day.
List of countries making wearing masks compulsory one way or the other:
Masks and terminology
While simply covering your mouth and nose will work to reduce the probability of becoming infected. There are various types of masks, which you might be interested to know about. Masks are available in various protection levels – called FFP with a number, i.e. FFP1, FFP2 or FFP3. FFP stands for filtering face piece. The numbering defines the various protection levels. The higher the number the higher the protection level. FFP3 has the highest level of protection. The equivalent in US for FFP2 masks are the N95, which is a comparable classification of air filtration. N95 means that it filters at least 95% of airborne particles. There are N99 and N100, where the number provides you with the efficiency of the mask, meaning the minimum percentage for filtering airborne particles.
Since there is global shortage for these types of masks and they should be primarily used by healthcare workers, you can use homemade masks too. That’s why some countries are hesitant with asking the public to wear masks. They are afraid they’ll run out of masks for their healthcare workers. To avoid that you can find below some links and suggestions for how to make masks at home. Or just use a scarf or bandana to cover your mouth and nose.
Instructions on how to make masks yourself – Do it yourself (DIY) masks:
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-diy-coronavirus-homemade-mask-material-covid/
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Cloth-Face-Mask/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJWhZJZoAe4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IiT9cSD-Ec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUasSmReIVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIuQMZ1Iw5M
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-diy-coronavirus-homemade-mask-material-covid/
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Cloth-Face-Mask/
And many more instructions on YouTube!
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What the World Innovations Forum asks you is: be creative and let the world know about your ideas and best practices to fight the pandemic.
Find out more about the initiative at: http://wiforum.org/innovate-fighting-pandemics/
Start participating in the conversation and join one of our dedicated groups:
The World Innovation Forum provides you a platform to share, engage, accelerate the adoption and scale your innovation with its global network of innovative minds. Be part of the innovation acceleration to fight the pandemic.
Thank you!
The World Innovation Forum
PS: Do you want to be part of the team? It is a global initiative driven by volunteers around the world. It is a growing effort. We need more volunteers to work with us on the innovation acceleration initiative of the World Innovation Forum. If you are interested to support us with your time and network, please send us an email to innovate.fighting.pandemics@wiforum.org and include a few words about yourself and what you can contribute to the initiative.
Covid-19 is only one crisis of many in our near past – and you will learn to live with crises in the future. Moreover, you should make your startup crisis resistant.
Many of us read the news and daily updates from around the world every morning. We know already what worked and what didn’t from China, from South Korea, from Singapore and many other Asian countries. But this is only if you speak English or are digital savvy enough to automatically translate everything into your language. In recent discussions we learned that far more than half of the governments in the world do not speak english. They are dependent of what others tell them what is happening. Also those who are looking for test equipment, treatment, best practices, what type of hygiene measures they may consider long before the rest of the word slowly woke up. The English language no longer is the universal language for doing business around the globe, it is the number one language of communication also in any kind of crisis. Speaking one common language – at least as a second language – is paramount for our survival, not only in business but also in our general life. And it will also closing the gap between rich and poor, My proposal for the United Nation: Making “English as a common language on earth” the SDG #18.
In only 10 weeks the world has turned to digital faster than all the efforts of even the most powerful governments on earth in the last 10 years. Companies with a home office concept could almost seamlessly transition from their office buildings to home offices. But going digital is not only an emergency action to stay in business: In the past few weeks we had far more client interactions online than ever before. Trying to setup a meeting, finally finding a convenient day and time, traveling an hour to do a meeting for another hour is over. TODAY: “Do you have a moment?” – “Sure – give me 5 minute” – “How can I help” – We have this and that issue … Ok ….” 15 minute later, everything was done. And not next week – but immediately. We accelerated work by 2.5 hours and reduced the “problem to solution” time by maybe a week. In our particular case run so called demo days after each startup acceleration program. We rent a venue invite investors and let our entrepreneurs present in front of approximately 15 to 25 investors sometimes a little more. This year we just invited 800 investors from around the world and have already more registrations than ever before. This year, the Demo Day is digital and everybody can join it on April 8, from wherever they are. A huge advantage. Of course this is no real substitute for face to face meetings but it is a powerful option that we will consider in the future. And we also have our global 3 day WIForum Digital 2020 Conference this year in June. 3 days and we expect 2,000 people from over 40 countries. Of course it is fully digital. In countries where Corona may have been enough contained we will do – like last time – public viewings in the respective cities, have about 40 – 50 speakers, including governments, universities and many top talented innovative businesses. All digital, and on top of all, no Co² emission, no travel no energy expenditure, maximum cost reduction and more. Even after corona is contained our work life will never be like it was. We learned to become more independent and far more efficient if we put our old “protocols” aside and spend time for meetings when and wherever, get problems solved immediately and build relations that go far deeper than ever before. However what is an advantage for some will become an even bigger disadvantage for the slow and far less agile businesses.
One of the new key words. People are isolated at home and lack of social interactions. Its a very uncomfortable situation to be alone – not only in times of an pandemic. Yet. also here we quickly learned to hang out with friends online. And not just adults but also kids – at least those who have been online before. Multi Player Games and all the other digital entertainment out there comes extremely hande when a whole family stays home. BUT not only to shut of the kids – but to to give them an opportunity to learn about social connections in the digital world. I have been working in the social media world since its inception in 2003. Today, 17 years later, I have an equal amount of friends that I never met face to face in my entire life. From some I know far more what is going on in their lives than from some of my family members. My old friend Des Walsh, who I never met in person but have been connected for 10 years now, is older than 99% of my oldest local friends who never touched Facebook. Social Distancing is a problem that we can overcome. And those who have the experience for years, learned about digital body language, read the mind of somebody not by seeing their facial expressions but writing style would certainly not suffer social distancing at all. Whether in business or in our private lives, we learned already so much about others from the daily interactions in the online world that we get a completely different perspective of the media.
Another aspect of life is our ability to innovate. In times of a crisis innovation pops right and left. Companies that seem to unable to innovate get all of a sudden very creative. Instead of building car parts they build facial masks to protect people because they know how to build filters. Others get great ideas to build simple but globally accessible apps showing latest discoveries about the virus and best practices to protect one another. We created an initiative “Innovate Fighting Pandemics” to inspire innovative mind, from all trades to share their ideas so that others can find solutions to problems they may have. What we all learned is that innovation is not a reserved domain for highly educated scientists but we all are innovative, as long as we give our mind the free space to think. And in times like now it is simply accelerating for survival – why not always give our mind the freedom to go crazy.
Another learning we already can envision is to make our business processes and production structures far more flexible in thinking and in operation. Right now, today Mar 27, many companies ca no longer produce because people are at home for their own safety and cannot produce an automobile from their home office. But why is it that brutal? Because we think in maximum “employee utilisation”. The production runs are so hyper optimized that there is not even a “Plan B”. Instead of stopping the motion to zero, we can get a bit smarter. We can already today let 50% of the employees come back who have for sure no symptoms. Ask them to avoid mass transportation and go with individual transportation to the manufacturing plant. Likely hood that they catch a virus is low and cross contamination with those who have been healthy at home for two weeks extremely low. Two weeks later we run the second “mega-shift” and ask the other group to go back to work. Four weeks later we most likely are back to full production.Obviously it takes some major co-ordination, super machine and workplace cleaning in between shift but also during the shifts, orchestrating the right people for a half production load and so forth but that Plan B is probably with millions of dollars per day worth of business loss. Post Corona we will never go back to static operations but will want to consider more flexibility, driving more agility and giving the organization a better competitiveness.
Small businesses, shops, retailer, reseller, and so forth have been struggling to stay alive, not able competing against the big e-commerce giants. For many it will be a sad ending as they just could not decide to think about smart alternatives they can offer to their customers. The retail market has changed, consumer behavior and desires advanced, but their payer did not. At the same time many, very fortunately, finally understood what customers want and shifted towards online offerings, home delivery, better logistics, better return policies so that ended up become far more competitive and customers find better services. Some countries blocked any innovation that put their small retailers in jeopardy. In times like right now is fires back badly. They have to spend more money to support the failing businesses and have missed the development they couldn’t stop anyway. E-commerce, fast home delivery, return policies and processes have improved more and faster in the past 10 weeks than in the last five years. Countries with weird import regulations, difficult taxation and more see their self sufficiency rate go much faster down than in other countries. Again – life post corona will never go back to what it was before.
The 7 virtues of idea validation
From day one till now, we decided to work on the ground. So when we visited countries and worked with young entrepreneurs or those who want to become one, we feel the heartbeat and learn how we can support them best. Amazingly, we experienced a warm welcome from entrepreneurs. We realized they rarely an opportunity to speak with experienced entrepreneurs from other countries. When we talked to local co-working spaces, accelerators and investors, we experienced a much more critical position. “What is your plan, what is your approach, what do you want to do?” our answer was always the same: “We have no plan, there is no approach, we don’t know what we will do. You will tell us how we can be helpful and we see what we can do”. We experienced an amazing transformation from a polite and professional welcome to a warm and friendly ‘love to hear your story’. Over time we heard lots of stories about support organization. To sum it up and make a narrative: “They come here, have a clear plan, based on what their sponsors tell them to do, execute “their plan”, make a lot of stirrup, then come with a team of professional photographers and camera men where everybody smiles, write reports and go back home to hunt for the next round of funding. We appreciate the help but often times it’s just too much work for us with no progress at all”. So why do you do that? we asked. Answer: We are not in a position to say no. Again, our own position was up for discussion: Are we in a position to say no and follow our own entrepreneurial instincts? So far we met and spoke with roughly 1,000 entrepreneurs and startups from a variety of countries including Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Peru, and a few others. We met with about 50 investors and investor networks, more than 50 co-working spaces, universities other enablers and with several leading politicians in various capacities. We ran two accelerator programs and a series of entrepreneurs workshops. The feedback was inspiring and moving.
Who drives the Trillion $ aid industry?
The disconnect between donations and real help is growing. Over the holidays 2019/2020 we felt that we either find a radically different model or freeze the operation until somebody else is coming up with a better idea. Since no model was in sight and we experienced the deep frustration from other organizations, we decided to use our own innovation design techniques to explore alternative ways. As a first step, we disconnected ourselves from the conventional NGO space in favor of the actual beneficiaries we live for. The goal is to overcome the problematic “disconnect” from the group of people we want to help and find a modus operandi to finance the organization in a different way. With that we did a few things that should help us think on different levels:
1) We believe in innovation on all levels – also for organization models.