Technological Developments and Innovations to Drive the Post-COVID-19 World Economy

The novel coronavirus has just highlighted the value of digital preparedness and Industry 4.0-driven technologies that helped businesses across the globe be functional even during these unprecedented times. In the past, as was the case with the Spanish flu pandemic that broke out in the 1920s, it was witnessed that these kinds of pandemics could wreak havoc and disrupt supply chains, thereby rendering businesses functionless. However, this pandemic demonstrated that organizations and businesses could stay relevant and be fully operational even in these uncertain times by adopting new technologies and refining the ones already in use. ‘Necessity is the mother of all inventions,’ and this pandemic proved to be the ultimate catalyst for digital transformation that will greatly accelerate several major trends that were already well underway before the pandemic (Banafa, 2020). The global lockdown has forced industries to adopt remote working, something that was already there but was never adopted on a larger scale. Work from home thereby helped in the large-scale adoption of cloud computing and virtualization. Predictive analytics driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning have also been refined in this COVID-19 era to promote e-commerce and online business. AI, virtual reality (VR), 3D printing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing are some of the technologies that were always touted to disrupt the entire industrial scenario and hence were regarded as Industry 4.0 technologies. Despite this, in the pre- COVID-19 era, there were industries that were hesitant to adopt them on a large scale for their operations. However, in this pandemic era, there has been large-scale adoption of these technologies, and after COVID-19, this trend is likely to continue. In this chapter, we discuss the world economy post COVID-19 from a technological perspective that could benefit businesses.