Build Ecosystems @ KUSI Ideas Festival 2020

 

Build Ecosystems @ KUSI Ideas Festival 2020

While thanking the organizers, participants and promoters for the presidential engagement of the KUSI Ideas Festival 2020, I do hope that the discussion will move from Ideas to action in the immediate and short term.  The event was predicated on Post COVID scenarios and discussed Pre-COVID options, but was reminded firmly that proactive “In-COVID” initiatives are perhaps the most important things we can do with our time right now. Rather than draw up industry blueprints and grand recovery plans to be acted upon when COVID has passed, we must establish ecosystems that support the emergence of those industries and recovery plans. Building cotton factories is unsustainable if there are no farmers growing cotton and no ecosystem to support its passage from farmland to fashion house. You can ban used clothes imports today, but with no ecosystem to support the local clothing industry, you merely strike the used clothes market off the tax radar. Our In-COVID responsibility and action therefore is to establish the ecosystems that will support the grand plans we have for a post-COVID recovery. Ecosystems, however, take time to build. They are not installed like factories. Ecosystems are an association of ideas, initiatives, incentives, profit motives, livelihoods, entrepreneurial activity and connectivity provided by technology, protected by a legal environment that advances national interests. Ecosystems are the invisible networking of a confluence of initiatives, like a spider’s web, that guarantee and sustain the economic survival of all stakeholder in a food chain.