From Aileen Ionescu-Somers and Anna Tarnawa
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor

During the first week of March 2020, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) consortium gathered in Miami, Florida to hold its Annual Meeting and 2019/20 Global Report Launch. GEM is the largest entrepreneurship-related research initiative worldwide that focuses on early-stage entrepreneurship. Travel/visa complications and the introduction of hand sanitizer around the conference venue on the second day of the conference were first indicators of looming changes to come. Upon returning to their countries, many conference participants faced a very different world from the one they had left, with hand sanitizers, gloves, masks, remote working and “social distancing” becoming part of daily life.

The GEM consortium of some 300+ academic experts in entrepreneurship generally agree that, along with the 1918 Spanish flu, the Great Depression, the two world wars and the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19 is a “black swan” event of epic proportions that is dramatically changing the face of business and industry — indeed “life as we knew it” — around the globe. Most countries are still in the throes of what may yet prove to be the “early stages” of the pandemic; there is currently great uncertainty about how the current highly volatile situation will evolve. For example, is a second wave of infections imminent in fall/winter of 2020? Rarely have non-scientific or economic experts collected data with such intensity and concern.