Rapid crowdsourced innovation for COVID-19 response and economic growth
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s41746-021-00397-5.pdf
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706.6 KB
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Author(s)
Ramadi, Khalil
Nguyen, Freddy T.
Date Issued
February 2021
Journal
NPJ Digital Medicine
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Ramadi, Khalil B. and Freddy T. Nguyen." NPJ Digital Medicine 4, 1 (February 2021): 18. © 2021 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected life worldwide. Governments have been faced with the formidable task of implementing public health measures, such as social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns, while simultaneously supporting a sluggish economy and stimulating research and development (R&D) for the pandemic. Catalyzing bottom-up entrepreneurship is one method to achieve this. Home-grown efforts by citizens wishing to contribute their time and resources to help have sprouted organically, with ideas shared widely on the internet. We outline a framework for structured, crowdsourced innovation that facilitates collaboration to tackle real, contextualized problems. This is exemplified by a series of virtual hackathon events attracting over 9000 applicants from 142 countries and 49 states. A hackathon is an event that convenes diverse individuals to crowdsource solutions around a core set of predetermined challenges in a limited amount of time. A consortium of over 100 partners from across the healthcare spectrum and beyond defined challenges and supported teams after the event, resulting in the continuation of at least 25% of all teams post-event. Grassroots entrepreneurship can stimulate economic growth while contributing to broader R&D efforts to confront public health emergencies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Medical Engineering & Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-021-00397-5
