Pandemic Preparedness

The four papers included in this proposed session demonstrate how business history, combined with “the theory of innovative enterprise,” can shed light on the preparedness of companies and countries for the Covid-19 pandemic. William Lazonick’s contribution summarizes, updates, and elaborates an argument concerning the deleterious impacts of corporate financialization on pandemic preparedness originally made in a working paper that he published with Matt Hopkins in July 2020 to explain the ventilator shortage in the early months of the pandemic. Hopkins’ study of Respironics documents the remarkable growth of an innovative U.S. ventilator company from one person in 1971 to 4,900 employees at the end of 2007, when its was sold to Netherlands-based Philips, which, in the name of maximizing shareholder value, has virtually destroyed the capabilities of its Respironics division. Öner Tulum compares the business histories of Germany-based BioNTech and U.S.-based Moderna, arguing that the German company needs money to do science whereas the U.S. company controls science to make money—with important implications for our understanding of the social conditions of innovative enterprise in different national contexts. Marie Carpenter analyzes investments in videoconferencing at Cisco Systems in the first decade of this century, out of which Zoom emerged as an independent company in 2008, followed by its innovative growth prior to the pandemic, while, during the pandemic, corporate financialization left Cisco’s Webex with an inferior platform and a shrinking videoconferencing market share.