Pandemic and Resilience

Society, Economy and Environment Sustainability

On December 16th, 2021 in National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan), the research team held ”Pandemic and Resilience: Society, Economy and Environment Sustainability Forum”. The forum shared the current research findings of resilience management from speakers focusing on society, economy and enterprises, respectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously caused an economic crisis everywhere and has exposed the vulnerability of existing social and economic systems. How enterprises showed their resilience to cope with the uncertain environment becomes the key issue for both academia and industry. The research team held "Pandemic and Resilience: Society, Economy and Environment Sustainability Forum” on December 16th, 2021 in National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. The forum shared the current research findings of resilience management from speakers focusing on society, economy and enterprises, respectively. In addition, the forum was open to new research ideas, hoping to draw on collective wisdom, and co-creating innovative solutions for the industry and enterprises to enhance Taiwan resilience capability.

There are three sessions with different experts sharing their resilience research. In addition to the team researchers, our research partners from US and Indonesia, Dr. Yi-Chin Lin and Dr. Nina Windasari joined the forum. The forum has delivered our mission and initiatives by the invitation letter by the campus email system, the social media and the to the potential audiences, including the professors, the students and people from industry. The distribution of the letter is not only the invitation but also a way to let people recognize our team and our mission. We optimistically estimated that the delivery of the initiatives can reach more than a thousand people thanks to the multiple Internet channels.

The attendees joining the physical forum reaches 56 people. The attendees came from diverse fields. Part of them are the students from different departments of National Tsing Hua University, the other part of the students are from other universities. The attending students include PhD, graduate students and undergraduate students. Besides, we also invited attendees from industry to join our event to explore more issues of resilience. The forum also provided a live stream via Youtube to those who were not able to join the physical forum but are interested in our topic.

The first session focuses on Dynamic Capabilities in a Learning Society. This session attempts to discuss how progress in civil societal engagement leads to a nation gaining a resilient core to withstand (an unexpected) crisis (e.g., economics, health, natural disaster, etc.). It is particularly relevant as many countries with a democratic society will need to stay resilient during times of uncertainty. In this session, we will highlight certain case studies that are deemed topical and noteworthy for productive discussion. We hope this dialogue will lead to many more follow-up research and studies, as it is vital to acquire lessons and insights on how important communication and development principles and learning routine can be put into practice.

The second session is Service and Information system for Resilient Businesses. In viewing businesses in service systems, we first conducted case studies across three regions in three countries in order to identify the common patterns that small businesses in dining/food services survived from COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to source best practices in different contexts to generate business processes as candidate components to compose resilient service offerings. Moreover, we are developing a peer-to-peer system embedded with multi-agent techniques. The actors in the service system can simulate alternative business processes under various circumstances in order to facilitate them to compose and evolve business models to sustain their business from unexpected changes. We further developed physical agents to facilitate users to communicate among different actors in order to communicate and coordinate on the fly to compose new processes in order to cope with the unexpected changes, and moreover to transform service networks in order to adapt to the new reality of service contexts. By practicing and testing these proposed techniques and operations, we anticipate developing the service design methodology for resilience. The information technologies underlying resilient service systems must themselves be quick to develop, robust to changes, and easy to integrate. To this end, we seek to experiment with, and simplify, recent trends in model-driven and low-code architectures that could allow organizations to quickly put solutions together. To gather the intelligence needed to drive future applications, we also seek to prototype data pipelining technologies that are easier to use, deploy, and modify. We also seek to model these data and architectural tools to better integrate into existing business processes.

This forum is a milestone and as a joint effort from macro, meso and micro views. Attendants were coming from researchers and students of NTHU, academic fields and industries. We took this opportunity and arranged our last Session to boost resilience research and practice in academics and industries.

We want to establish a Resilience Academy（韌學堂) (https://www.facebook.com/Residemy) to grow and propagate new knowledge and skills in resilience. Besides, the Resilience Academy is a community of practice, it is a peer-to-peer learning circle to engage people interested in resilience to cooperate and share the benefits from resilience related studies and practices. This is all our social impact which we displayed in three sessions of resilience related critical issues, resilience academy platform and community of research and practices.