First week is over. Some of us in self-isolation others in quarantine but all of us at home. How are we coping or how am I coping personally?

There is a lot of talking about pre-corona versus post-corona. Some even compare it with the biggest crises after World War 2. Don’t really agree on this because I am at a very safe place with my family and no immediate danger.

Of course this doesn’t mean that some cannot feel lost and irritated. And yes, that is also how I feel. Not all the time but every other day and sometimes it is really frustrating. We are all so used to meeting each other permanently. We go to work every day, meet our friends afterwards and do our shopping whenever we need to. Doesn’t sound too different to my routine now but with the huge difference that I do all of this online now.

One of the hardest things for me is that we had to cancel our ‘1^st Innovation Day featuring Plug and Play’ in April. So much work and brainpower was involved that it hurt to finally inform everyone that it won’t happen. At least not this year. (we are working on a new date but this takes time…).

Also so many great people and organizations that we work with had to cancel their events such as Fifteen Seconds, Mission Innovation Austria, Zukunftskonferenz of Joanneum Research and many others. We can only guess how hard it is on them but we are very optimistic that it is only a good-bye for now!

What I learned already over the last week is that I’m a social person with a big need of real-life contact. Online is great and most of the times very efficient but I’m missing all the people around me. Besides of missing my friends I have to admit I absolutely miss my team. Yes getting a little bit emotional here 😉

We do meet over Microsoft Teams every other day and it sure is nice seeing each other. As close as we can get at the moment but I have to admit that is does work- on a professional level. The work gets done and I have the feeling that we all do our best to make things work.

I also have a feeling that there won’t be the day X where we simply go back to pre-corona times. But is this a bad thing? No, not for me. I personally believe (maybe it’s more a hope…) that we all will be a little bit more careful with ourselves, our time but most of all our environment. We shouldn’t take everything for granted and when we talked about action for our climate before, now we should really start doing it.

We as the next-incubator started working on our sustainability strategy last quarter of 2019 and I just love to see that we are still on it- no team lock-down so far 🙂

So don’t expect us to stop us from doing what we love because ideas:it has to be done!

Christa Kloibhofer-Krampl