Ten transform emergency now! - Facing covid 19 with open and frugal innovation

Against a pandemic, speed is crucial, and open innovation (OI) helps to empower the human capital distributed around the world to tackle the disease and to launch rapid testing of possible solutions. This article aims at showing an OI program - called “TEN” Transform Emergency Now! - ideated and developed by the University of Bologna to identify, design, and implement useful solutions to tackle specific issues coming from pandemics. With an action research-innovation management approach, the University developed two iterations to identify what elements to take into account to define a program that works for this effort. In TEN, Frugal Innovation (FI) principles were injected in a 10 days hackathon to favor the use of locally available resources and raw materials and exclude nonessential features. Results show that Frugality can become an element of OI by (1) pushing the team towards basic functionality and minimal features of the solutions and low-cost implementation. (2) Designing, in parallel with the solution, an ‘implementation network’, with a specific process design and program’s organizational perspective. We believe that TEN has the potential to be an OI approach designed for emergencies.