Filipino companies need to invest in innovation and digital technologies to successfully ride out the pandemic and drive post-crisis growth.

Rolan Marco Garcia, chief executive officer and managing partner at Embiggen Consulting, underscored the importance of adopting innovation mindset, strategic foresight, and digital mindset.

“Covid-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) as we know has pushed industries over the technology tipping point and transformed business forever. This is now the next normal business. And history suggests that businesses, MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) or otherwise that invest in innovation through a crisis, whether it be a financial crisis or possibly pandemic like today, outperformed peers during the recovery period which we are now enteringÂ…,” he said in a webinar.

Garcia said these firms having an innovation mindset outperform those who do not innovate in terms of revenues and bouncing back from the financial crisis or a pandemic.

He said another important mindset for startup founders and entrepreneurs are the use of strategic foresight.

“The largest shifts during the crisis are most likely to stick 10 to 20 years from now which is where you might be able to use foresight,” he added. “Changes for example in consumer behavior, changes in how people interact with businesses, people interact with each other have changed. So strategic foresight or using futures thinking will enable you to perhaps create possible futures and build those possible futures or solutions to those possible futures as early as today.”

Garcia said firms need to figure out how to seamlessly create a digital omnichannel presence for their sales processes and business development cycles.

He cited as example increased spending in data security and investments in advanced technology in operations.

Garcia further said having a digital mindset is also imperative, adding that participation in the digital economy enabled by technology pushed companies to survive the crisis.

“Those who are agile enough for example to be able to participate in the digital economy, shifting their business models, shifting their value propositions online — these were the companies that really survived the crisis,” he said.

Garcia said the Covid-19 crisis has also accelerated the digitalization of customer interaction by several years.