Being a grand challenge of global scale, the COVID-19 pandemic requires collective and collaborative efforts from a variety of actors to enable the expected scientific advancement and technological progress. To achieve such an open innovation approach, several initiatives have been launched in order to leverage potential distributed knowledge sources that go beyond those available to any single organization. A particular tool that has gained some momentum during COVID-19 times is hackathons, which have been used to unleash the innovation potential of individuals who voluntarily came together, for a relatively short period of time, with the aim to solve specific problems. In this paper, we describe and analyze the case of the hackathon EUvsVirus, led by the European Innovation Council. EUvs Virus was a 3-day online hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners, and investors across Europe and beyond in order to develop innovative solutions to coronavirus-related challenges. We have identified four dimensions to explore hackathons as a crowdsourcing tool for practicing effective open innovation in the face of COVID-19: broad scope, participatory architecture, online setting, and community creation. We discuss how these four elements can play a strategic role in the face of grand challenges, which require, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, both urgent action and long-term thinking. Our case analysis also suggests the need to look beyond the ‘usual suspects’, through knowledge recombination with atypical resources (e.g., retired experts, graduate students, and the general public). On this basis, we call for a broader perspective on open innovation, to be extended beyond openness across organizational boundaries, and to explore the role of openness at societal level.

中文翻译：

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面对 COVID-19 重大挑战的开放式创新：来自泛欧黑客马拉松“EUvsVirus”的见解

作为全球规模的重大挑战，COVID-19 大流行需要各种行为者的集体和协作努力，以实现预期的科学进步和技术进步。为了实现这种开放式创新方法，已经启动了几项举措，以利用超出任何单一组织可用的潜在分布式知识源。在 COVID-19 期间获得一些动力的特定工具是黑客马拉松，它已被用于在相对较短的时间内释放自愿聚集在一起的个人的创新潜力，以解决特定问题。在本文中，我们描述和分析了由欧洲创新委员会领导的黑客马拉松 EUvsVirus 的案例。EUvs Virus 是一个为期 3 天的在线黑客马拉松，旨在将欧洲及其他地区的公民社会、创新者、合作伙伴和投资者联系起来，以开发应对冠状病毒相关挑战的创新解决方案。我们已经确定了四个维度来探索黑客马拉松作为一种众包工具，以便在面对 COVID-19 时实践有效的开放式创新：广泛的范围、参与式架构、在线设置和社区创建。我们讨论了这四个要素如何在面对巨大挑战时发挥战略作用，就像 COVID-19 大流行一样，这需要紧急行动和长期思考。我们的案例分析还表明，需要通过与非典型资源（例如，退休专家、研究生和公众）的知识重组来超越“通常的嫌疑人”。在此基础上，