The world is currently going through a potentially deep economic crisis due to decrease in demand mainly.
People fall mainly in one of these categories:
- poor people used to leave from one paycheck to another, making only essential purchases;
- new poor – people who had a stable income but lost their jobs due to crisis. They will also make now only essential purchases;
- people with stable incomes, mainly middle class with incomes not yet affected. They will add to the essential purchases some extras (electronics, vacations etc.) but much under what they used to spent since they have no guarantees about the stability of their income;
- rich people – they continue to spend but at a lower rate.
Since the market is shrinking there is no space for all the providers, so companies have to be innovative to survive. For the companies providing food, medicines, utilities (gas, electricity, water, waste management) the situation will be quite good, but what about the other domains? These companies will be in great danger to decrease dramatically or practically dissapear. What choices do they have?
During crisis innovation is fostered and the history is showing it, the steam engine, radio, light bulb, tape recording, sharing economy platforms all appeared during crisis. Now we have many opportunities with digitalisation, easy access to internet, smartphones. You can reach the potential customer very easily, the barriers of entry in many domains are close to zero so if you are innovative and deliver what the client is actually looking for you can even benefit from the crisis. Especially product delivery is a field where the demand has increased drastically and many of the current operators are still missing what the clients want. I give you the example of Getir, a turkish start-up which offer you the possibility to have your products at your door in 10 to 20 minutes, I found it exceptionally while the competition needs a few days when you may not even need them. Also they help local shops to sell their merchandise more easily by operating as a Getir franchise.
There are also opportunities in online gaming, online watching, online sports and many more, people want now to consume more products and services from their home and companies have to adapt to it otherwise somebody wlse will do it.
RO Innovation blog - Innovating in Romania 