Grand challenges, covid‐19 and the future of organizational scholarship

Abstract

Grand challenges are “formulations of global problems that can be plausibly addressed through coordinated and collaborative effort” (George et al., 2016: 1880). By this definition, the Covid-19 pandemic certainly registers as a grand challenge. It is a type of problem scientists have been warning about for decades – a pandemic unleashed when a virus jumps from animals to humans, in part due to habitat loss (IPBES, 2019). The pandemic’s global reach has no bounds; its economic, social, and health consequences affect us all. We all hope this problem can be plausibly addressed through coordinated and collaborative effort. Indeed, the myriad researchers working globally to develop a vaccine suggest extensive coordinated – though not exclusively collaborative (Spinney, 2020) – effort.