The novel coronavirus has created one of the biggest social and economic challenges in recent decades. Since a critical issue in overcoming a large-scale pandemic involves finding effective treatments for the disease, there is typically urgent pressure on the health-care sector to develop innovations to combat the pandemic. Recently, scholars have argued that repurposing – that is, reusing an existing innovation in a different context – allows for such rapid innovation responses and can reduce costs, as the groundwork has already been laid. In this paper, we compare these benefits with the considerable disadvantages associated with innovation repurposing, including lowered barriers to entry, which can lead to declining average quality and duplicate work. Using data on 2,456 COVID-19-related clinical trials initiated between December 2019 and July 2020, we find that merely one-third of the trials actually investigated drugs or vaccines, whereas the rest focused on diagnostics and crisis management issues. In the trials concerning drug testing, we find that drug repurposing is a predominant innovation strategy, but many trials tested the same (combination of) drugs. This indicates an inefficient use of resources and reductions in the average variety and novelty of clinical trials. Furthermore, the small percentage of biopharmaceutical firms involved in the search for COVID-19 treatments raises the question of whether firms may have insufficient incentives to redirect innovation efforts to respond to the pandemic. Our paper contributes to crisis management research, the nascent debate on COVID-19, and the emerging literature on innovation repurposing.

中文翻译：

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无目的地重新利用？对 COVID-19 危机的早期创新反应：来自临床试验的证据

新型冠状病毒造成了近几十年来最大的社会和经济挑战之一。由于克服大规模流行病的一个关键问题涉及寻找有效的疾病治疗方法，因此医疗保健部门通常面临着开发创新以对抗大流行病的紧迫压力。最近，学者们认为，再利用——即在不同的背景下重新利用现有创新——可以实现如此快速的创新反应并可以降低成本，因为基础工作已经奠定。在本文中，我们将这些好处与与创新再利用相关的相当大的缺点进行了比较，包括降低进入门槛，这可能导致平均质量下降和重复工作。使用 2 上的数据，在 2019 年 12 月至 2020 年 7 月期间启动的 456 项 COVID-19 相关临床试验中，我们发现只有三分之一的试验实际研究了药物或疫苗，而其余的则侧重于诊断和危机管理问题。在有关药物测试的试验中，我们发现药物再利用是一种主要的创新策略，但许多试验测试了相同（组合）的药物。这表明资源的低效利用以及临床试验的平均多样性和新颖性的减少。此外，参与寻找 COVID-19 治疗方法的生物制药公司的比例很小，这引发了一个问题，即公司是否可能没有足够的动力来重定向创新努力以应对大流行。我们的论文有助于危机管理研究，关于 COVID-19 的新生辩论，