Open innovation and intellectual capital during emergency: evidence from a case study in telemedicine

ABSTRACT

The achievement of innovation performance by means of open innovation (OI) is not automatic and intellectual capital (IC) can play a pivotal role. In 2020, COVID-19 challenged the sanitary systems and required to rapidly introduce innovative health technologies. By unleashing multitudes of brains, OI may help. However, the pandemic introduced social distancing that acted to the detriment of firms’ IC, which should guarantee OI successfulness. This tension pushed us to investigate how OI affects IC to provide effective and timely innovative solutions during crises.

We studied a company that rapidly modified its telemedicine product to provide a Local Health District (LHD) with an effective solution for monitoring COVID-19 patients. By distinguishing between OI developed prior to (ex-ante) and post (ex-post) the COVID-19 outbreak, we show that ex-post OI can build on IC strengthened by ex-ante OI and hence allow higher performance needed to combat the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Social capital
• organisational capital
• human capital
• telemedicine
• emergency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).