Third Edition: Emerging from the pandemic and facing new challenges

In the last 24 months, our lives, organizations and countries have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This time has also served us to reflect not only on how to recover from the situation but also on how to transform ourselves with better business and sustainable development models to achieve a more promising future than we could have aspired to before this crisis.

INCAE Business Review has accompanied its readers with analyzes and recommendations to face the different stages of the pandemic. This edition continues this evolution, now offering new perspectives on the immediate post-pandemic future and the long-term challenges for our organizations and countries. The authors reveal new trends, skills and "mindsets" that we must keep in mind to succeed in the "new normal". They also make proposals so that our countries become more attractive for foreign and domestic investment and can take advantage of the current reconfiguration of global value chains.

In this new stage, achieving successful transformations in our societies will depend on our ability to transform our organizations. Both must prepare for an increasingly digital future, with greater climate risks and social tensions. But, it will be very difficult to successfully transform our societies and organizations without first transforming ourselves as people. We must be clear about our values, roles and purposes to build the desired future. The challenge is raised and the responsibility is ours.

Octavio Martinez
CLACDS Director

As we have faced different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, INCAE Business Review has accompanied its audience by offering conceptual frameworks to understand and solve the relevant problems of the moment. In the July 2020 edition, at the peak of the pandemic, the magazine focused on understanding the nature of the virus, explaining contagion projection models, ways to reduce personal stress caused by isolation, and techniques management to operate businesses from the confinement. In the December 2020 edition, with the imminent start of vaccination campaigns, INCAE Business Review focused on post-pandemic recovery. The magazine then adopted the “country” as the main unit of analysis, and published a series of articles discussing the priorities of economic recovery in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. 
The set of articles in this edition explores two major situations: the immediate post-pandemic future and the long-term problems of institutions and countries. Figure 1 shows the way the articles are organized according to this dimension and the unit of analysis.

Luis López and Niels Ketelhöhn
INCAE Full Professors