COVID‐19 pandemic and innovation activities in the global airline industry: A review

Despite the valuable contributions of scholars to the COVID-19 pandemic, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the opportunities unleashed by the crisis. As many industries have been turned upside down and markets rendered uncertain, the crisis is also propelling waves of innovation activities. In this paper, we developed the concept of “CoviNovation” to denote the firm’s innovation emerging from, rooted in or accelerated by the crisis. Our analysis yielded insights on innovations inspired by COVID-19 across the global airline industry, including inflight social distancing, utilizing touchless technologies at airports, disinfecting aircraft with UV, open-middle-seat policy, accelerated use of biometrics in check-in and COVID-19 insurance. The theoretical and practical implications of the COVID-19-inspired innovations examined.