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. 2021 Feb 9;4(1):18.
doi: 10.1038/s41746-021-00397-5.

Rapid crowdsourced innovation for COVID-19 response and economic growth

Khalil B Ramadi  1   2   3   4   5 , Freddy T Nguyen  6   7   8   9
Affiliations

Rapid crowdsourced innovation for COVID-19 response and economic growth

Khalil B Ramadi et al. NPJ Digit Med. .

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

K.B.R. and F.T.N. are previous co-directors of M.I.T. Hacking Medicine. F.T.N. helped organize the virtual hackathons described here. The authors declare no other competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Worldwide crowdsourced innovation.
a, b Number of applicants per (a) country around the world and (b) state in the US for MIT COVID-19 Challenges. Gray color shading corresponds to no applicants from that country. c Fraction of teams continuing to work on their ideas post-event. Plots show team continuation for teams from recent virtual events and in-person events in 2016, 2017, and 2018 (GH, Grand Hack). Maps generated using Google GeoChart API under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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