Disruptive Innovations in New Globalization Era

The pandemic and geopolitics present a new inflection point that all industries and countries need to manage properly in order to survive the crisis and create new opportunities for growth. The globalization structure that we have taken for granted in the past fifty years is gone and a new globalization structure is slowly emerging. Instead of global supply chains and global markets, we may have strong regional supply chains and regional markets and weak connections between regions. It is not clear what the final structure will be, but one thing for sure is that the dynamic formation of the new globalization structure will be shaped by how companies and countries respond and manage the new inflection point through disruptive innovations. In this new globalization era, we need to re-think innovation factoring the unquantifiable pandemic and geopolitical risk into product development and business expansion decisions. For emerging technology businesses like clean energy, one needs to develop a resilient supply chain structure that would provide a proper balance between cost and risk exposure to unexpected disruption due to pandemic and geopolitics. For an established industry, like semiconductor, there will be new risk exposure in the current supply chain structure. New supply chain structures will emerge as companies respond to the disruptions caused by pandemics and geopolitics. We discuss the possible changes in the supply chain structure and how companies in the related industries should establish proper risk management policies and procedures to increase the chance of successfully managing the inflection point and creating new opportunities for their growth. To support developing a resilient supply chain, we identify new 0-1 innovation opportunities and discuss the important role that government can play in this new changing era that would shape the structure of new globalization and spur new national economic growth. We pick the following specific industries to focus our discussions: semiconductor, clean energy, mobile communication, robotics and AI.