A year before the COVID-19 outbreak, we co-authored an article, Winning the ’20s, in which we argued that the basis of competitive advantage was shifting. The combination of technology-fuelled change, the rise of new learning technologies, and declining long-term growth rates, which require accelerated innovation, called for companies to compete on their rate of learning.

This imperative has only been reinforced by the pandemic. COVID-19 has made organizations aware of the limits of their ability to learn quickly in an extremely fast-moving environment, in which 10 days of hesitation can lead to the quadrupling of infections, and to an escalation of business and societal disruption.