Industrial and Organizational Mutations in the Medical and Pharmaceutical Sectors Impulsed by Open Innovation During the Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic tragically emphasized severe failures of health systems. In particular, the saturation of hospital infrastructures and the lack of medical devices, as the crucial respiratory ventilators. The medical and pharmaceutical sectors had to find urgently new ways to innovate efficiently in R&D, to product devices, therapeutic trials and vaccines, and make them available on a large scale. Our work will analyze that these innovations related to Covid-19 have been largely based on Open Innovation. For that purpose, exploratory cases studies that exemplified the value of implementing Open Innovation in the pandemic context will be shown. These cases studies concern the pharmaceutical firms AstraZeneca, and Pfizer associated with the biotechnology company BioNTech, and the respiratory ventilator cases of open development coalition OxyGEN (from the design company Protofy.xyz to the hospitals network of Barcelona and the manufacturer SEAT) and the opening of Covidian PB 560 from the multinational medical engineering firm Medtronic. Methodologically, these cases studies build on a full referencing and a systematic analysis of articles, scientific documents, published reports related to the Open Innovation involvements of these organizations since the start of the pandemic. Based on the operative contributions from these revelatory cases studies, we will be able to show that contextually to pandemic emergency, Open Innovation is a highly efficient vector allowing extended partnerships for accelerated R&D, and operational production.