What Shakespeare said about greatness—some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them—turns out to also be true about innovation. One need look no further than various responses to the pandemic. Sectors from education to food service, filmmaking to event planning have all scrambled, with varying degrees of success, to innovate their operations for a world in lockdown. One of the most striking examples involves the abrupt shift in remittances—the money that people working abroad send back home to their loved ones—from being mainly cash to, at last, more digital forms. The title of a Forbes article from late May, “How money transfer companies squeezed four years of digital growth into just two months,” sums it up.
The trick now is to make sure that, after the pandemic subsides, the momentum is sustained. The stakes are high: for families, for countries, and for the global economy.
