OPEN INNOVATION TACKLING THE PANDEMIC
To respond to the global health crisis, there have been numerous open innovation projects like the Kambria @ www.kambria.io in the healthcare sector, including the fast design and manufacturing of personal protective equipment and medical devices, and testing, treatment and vaccine technologies. Many of this innovative activities happen beyond organizational boundaries with collaboration and open innovation like the Kambria @ www.kambria.io. Open innovation is defined as the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. which assumes that projects like the KambriaNetwork can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market as they look to advance their technology.
The pandemic has also dramatically changed the way organizations operate. Meanwhile, issues of social innovation and user innovation extend the context of open innovation and ecosystems by providing new products, services, or solutions which can solve social problems. Additionally, with the recent technology advancement of digitalization, big data, 3D printing technology, and Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR), digital and platform innovation based on the Internet becomes an emerging stream of innovation to transform business and social relationships with openness, affordances, and generativity. Meanwhile, to build business resilience during this emergency, organizations should think beyond the traditional boundaries of the supply chain. This phenomenon is linked to the concept of a business ecosystem, an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals, where participants co-evolve their capabilities and roles and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies. With the COVID-19 disruptions and challenging situations in a global economy featured with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), such a business ecosystem can provide a context for new supply chain transformation, highlighting co-evolution, dynamics, and interactions. The view of ecosystems can potentially be applied to open innovation with a further extension of the innovation boundaries. The impact of COVID-19 on businesses, society, and academic research has received much attention since March 2020. In the healthcare sector, there have been studies highlighting fast and frugal innovation and reverse innovation and crowdsourcing with empirical evidence, while others explore innovation across broader sectors. Despite this, a limited amount of evidence is found and, in fact, how open innovation strategy can be performed in times of crisis is still a new topic. Considering the above background, the key research question of this paper is “How can open innovation strategy help the healthcare sector to achieve flexibility and resilience in response to the COVID-19 crisis?” It provides an overview of the open innovation process that is pivotal in understanding the technological disruption amid the healthcare crisis. It aims to contribute to the theory of open innovation by exploring its new meanings, approaches, and connection to the business ecosystem paradigm during crisis. Also, as recent years have seen a rapid pace of globalization of financial markets and technological innovations, this implies that a severe shock, such as COVID-19 spreading throughout the globe, has raised significant challenges for the urgent research need for regulatory policies and effective governance that serve in critical and recovery times.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents what is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges ever faced by international development and humanitarian organizations. There have already been major consequences for the world’s poor and vulnerable, in terms of the direct impacts of the public health crisis on health and mortality, and indirect impacts on social, economic and political systems. The bilateral and multilateral aid system, long seen as over-stretched, is facing fundamental questions about how best to contribute to the pandemic response and the post-pandemic world that is starting to emerge. Moreover, the aid system is being rocked by the dramatic economic impacts of the pandemic. Key players are working out how best to navigate the reductions in gross national income in donor countries around the world, and the implications for ODA budgets. Innovation has attracted a lot of attention in the perfect storm scenario of the ongoing pandemic as a means of dealing with these challenges and a host of other related issues. In high- and low-resource settings alike, and from global through to local levels, effective responses have emphasized trial-and-error experimental approaches and the use of evidence and science to generate novel ideas.
Examples include:
- Rapidly developing and deploying tests, personal protective equipment (PPE), clinical procedures, pharmaceutical treatments, and the ultimate holy grail of reliable and safe vaccines to protect against COVID-19.
- Developing effective surveillance techniques and technologies for tracking and tracing cases.
- Identifying ways of reducing transmission, including appropriate measures for reducing social contact, shielding the most vulnerable, and quarantining suspected and known cases.
- Developing appropriate policies and interventions for dealing with social and economic effects, as well as ensuring a secure and sustainable longer-term recovery.
In this briefing paper, our aim is to share a number of emerging lessons about how innovation for development efforts have been faring in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and suggest how these efforts might be made more effective. We begin with a brief overview of the 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) peer learning exercise on innovation for development impact. This is followed by an overview of the COVID-19 innovation landscape, first with a global lens, and then with a focus on development and humanitarian investments. We then move on to discuss the lessons for innovation for development efforts in the context of the pandemic, drawing on a rapid consultation exercise with relevant stakeholders. We conclude with four specific proposals for consideration by the OECD, its member states and the wider development and humanitarian community.
A development and humanitarian overview
In low and middle-income settings that are the target of ODA investments, where capacity and resources are more limited, the need for innovation is, according to the United Nations, “more critical than ever… all relevant actors should work together to fund, design and deliver solutions”.2 Given the novel and unknown nature of the virus and its resulting impacts, innovation has played a role in informing appropriate responses to the pandemic from medical, public health and socio-economic perspectives, and also for effective recovery measures. For many development actors on the ground, the need for creative approaches was clearly apparent from the outset of the pandemic. There have been ongoing challenges around mobility of staff, communications, partner engagement, access and delivery of services, which have continued to affect the response. This has created a rich environment for many donors and partners to adapt and adopt new approaches, form partnerships with new actors, and test new approaches. Analysis of the USD 9 billion that has been publicly committed (as of 3 September 2020) indicates around 10% — approximately USD 919 million — has been pledged by actors with a focus on development and humanitarian work3. Analyzing the Policy Cures database, despite its health focus, is instructive as a starting point. By filtering for donors focused on development and humanitarian work, it has been possible to distinguish several kinds of innovation efforts. These have been fleshed out with inputs and insights from innovators, innovation funders, and development co-operation agencies in DAC member countries, as well as desk research. This process usefully reveals the range of innovation efforts that are underway to address the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities around the world.
Broadly speaking there are four distinct types of innovation work underway that focus on low- and middle-income countries. The different types of innovation efforts identified are defined in line with the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI)’s ‘innovation facets’ model (Figure 1).
Figure 1. OECD OPSI facets of public innovation
Notes: 1. Mission-driven innovation starts with a driving ambition to achieve an articulated goal, though the specifics of how it might be done are still unclear or are not set in stone.
1. Enhancement-oriented innovation often starts with the question of ‘How might we do X better?’ It is not about questioning what is being done, but rather how it is done and whether it can be done differently, and better.
2. Adaptive innovation starts with the question ‘How might our situation demand changes in how we do X?’ Adaptive innovation builds on the realisation that things are happening on the ground that don’t fit with what is expected, but could be beneficial.
3. Anticipatory innovation is essentially about recognising and engaging with significant uncertainty about not only what works, but also what is appropriate or possible.
Source: OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (n.d.[4]), Public Sector Innovation Facets, https://oecd-opsi.org/projects/innovation-facets/.
Applying this to analyse COVID-19 innovation efforts provides a deeper understanding of the different kinds of investments that can be observed. It also enables sharper strategic thinking about the overall innovation effort.
- Mission-driven innovation — The most obvious example here is the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and related arrangements for fair and widespread distribution. Also in this category are the much-publicised efforts to develop ventilators for managing acute COVID-19 cases. While the bulk of these innovation efforts are not focused on developing countries, there have been notable exceptions. For example, a unique public-private partnership to develop a USD 1 COVID-19 test has brought together the United Kingdom government, a global diagnostics firm, and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) in Senegal, as well as a number of collaborating academic institutions around the world that have undertaken evaluation and validation at numerous stages of development (Institut Pasteur, 2020[5]). The work has involved adapting an existing IPD innovative diagnostic (for dengue fever) for use with COVID-19. Other large-scale innovations at policy level include furlough and insurance schemes that have been put in place to support businesses and workers during widespread lockdown measures.
- Enhancement-oriented improvements — Many of the efforts in COVID-19 infection control and management fit into this area. For instance, the approach being taken around the world to tracking, tracing, quarantining and shielding vulnerable groups builds on lessons learned from previous epidemic responses, with adjustments made for the specific epidemiology of COVID-19. Some of these have seen novel processes, which upend the traditional development model of global North–South transfer noted above. The track and trace model used in the US State of Massachusetts (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2020[6]) has learned extensively from work in Africa, led by international non-governmental organisation PATH. Much of the technological innovation has also focused on incremental innovations. For example, there are numerous examples of medical devices — from ventilators to scanners — that have been simplified and made cheaper for both developed and developing countries. In some cases this has been through repurposing existing solutions or by rethinking existing problems: consider how waste plastic is being recycled and used to produce face visors in Dar es-Salaam in the United Republic of Tanzania. There are also widespread examples of digital innovations that have helped address a wide range of problems, from supporting household-level social protection mechanisms to modernising business finance facilities.
- Adaptive innovations — This refers to original, simple, locally generated ideas that enable results that would not otherwise be attainable. These grassroots innovations have emerged in environments where scarcity of resources compels human ingenuity. Some of these highly localised efforts are based on specific aspects of COVID-19 responses, such as low-cost and frugal production of effective PPE (e.g. the M-19 Initiative in India) (Maker’s Asylum, 2020[7]). In other settings, entire approaches to the response have emerged from local understanding and practices. For example, in Kerala, India, the response was led by the state-level government, whereas in the city of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, community-led innovations have underpinned efforts to support the extremely vulnerable survivors of the 1984 gas poisoning disaster.
- Anticipatory efforts — In the COVID-19 context, governments around the world are trying to rethink how the post-pandemic world should look. These include efforts focusing on a comprehensive ‘global reset’ of the international economic system that created such dramatic vulnerabilities to the pandemic, and on ensuring a ‘green recovery’. Much of this work is focused on policy-level innovations so that the global economy is re-established on a more sustainable footing, as well as the related organizational and technological innovations that might support these broader changes in societal and economic life. For example, in Viet Nam the government took a multi-pronged approach to the pandemic that addressed the immediate health impacts, the secondary economic impacts, but also placed an emphasis on social solidarity and civic participation, through both new and adapted technologies and processes, all at relatively low cost.
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