Innovation Insights: Build back better?
Commentary by Mike McMorris, LRIC CEO, October 2020
Times of challenge present opportunities. While most focus the past six months has been on dealing with COVID-19, you will have heard people talking recently about “Building Back Better”. But just what exactly does that mean? What is “better” and who gets to define it?
LRIC has been co-sponsoring, along with Poultry Industry Council, Ontario Veterinary College, Dairy at Guelph, and the Arrell Food Institute, of a series of sector specific webinars looking at what we have learned from COVID-19 that we could use to make our livestock sectors more resilient.
To date, we have held webinars for the poultry and dairy sectors. From these webinars, you will get a sense of what better may look like. You can access the recordings as follows:
Others are also looking ahead to forecast what we may experience. I recently read a lengthy article based on thoughts from over three dozen medical and scientific experts about the future. Check it out here.
In the article, Howard Markel, a historian of medicine at the University of Michigan reminds us that “The typical final act of health emergencies is “global amnesia,” when people forget the lessons of what they just lived through.”
For Ontario livestock to build back better, we need to learn from the challenges of COVID-19, determine what “better” looks like, and then work together, across sectors and with government and researchers to get there.
