WATCH: Innovating women in the metaverse

Among the trials and tribulations of the plague years, there was a silver lining.

In late 2020, with the approval of Covid-19 vaccines, and into 2021 as the jabs worked their magic, techno-optimism began to spread. If people could develop life-saving inoculations in months, why couldn’t the world move out of its low-growth, low-productivity slumber?

Firms could embrace digitisation as never before.The shift to working from home could allow people, free of office gossip and draining commutes, to work more effectively.Before long there would be vaccines for every disease imaginable.
Governments promised to spend big on science and companies outlined juicy R&D plans. It was quite a change of mood.

In the years before the pandemic, the rich world’s growth rate had drastically slowed. In the 2010s American labour productivity — output per hour of work — grew at half the pace of the decade before. Societies had become worse at finding new ideas, translating them into innovations and promulgating these innovations.

So what is happening to innovation locally and are the shiny new tech things all they are being out to be?

To talk about this Michael Avery is joined by Christine Strutt, partner at Von Seidels where she’s been practising intellectual property law for more than a decade and who featured in Managing Intellectual Property’s Top Women in IP; Merelda Wu, co-founder and CEO of melio.ai, a MLOps start-up helping companies commercialise their AI projects; and Nicky Verd, author of Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted.

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