Pandemic Makers: How Citizen Groups Mobilized Resources to Meet Local Needs in a Global Health Crisis

Abstract

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.

Crises, Covid-19, and Entrepreneurship

“…Indeed, such responses may also vastly increase the subjective well-being by the enhanced sense of agency and control over individuals' own lives. Similar outcomes are also often achieved by social entrepreneurs, but more than that, social entrepreneurs undertake actions that are primarily targeting others' welfare, and as demonstrated by Mittermaier et al's (2023) study of social entrepreneurs as well as Browder et al (2023) study of citizen groups, this can make a big difference. While public policy response is indispensable, it is almost never rapid enough and targeted enough due to the nature of political and administrative processes.…”

“…Different types of entrepreneurial motivations can thus lead to addressing different aspects of crises. The paper by Browder et al (2023) provides a study of how citizen groups connected to makerspaces seek to develop locally produced personal protective and healthcare equipment to deal with shortages. In this way, they examine how entrepreneurial citizens, in a form of collective entrepreneurship, mobilize shared resources to gain legitimacy and meet local needs that have arisen due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Hybrid innovation logics: Exploratory product development with users in a corporate makerspace

“…These diverse collectives of makers and hackers tend to promote a digital culture that leverages technology for empowerment and values open sharing of knowledge, designs, and physical materials (Lindtner, 2015; Raymond, 1999). The ethos of many makers opposes consumerism and prompts creative self‐expression for non‐pecuniary motives (i.e., personal utility) outside of traditional institutions such as firms (Browder et al, 2022; Coleman & Golub, 2008; Himanen, 2009; Lindtner et al, 2014; Shah & Tripsas, 2007). As such, to many makers, the phrase “corporate makerspace” is an oxymoron.…”

The role of effectuation and causation for SME survival amidst economic crisis

“…Strategic responses to crisis: literature review In 2020, the world economy has been severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Browder et al, 2022;Stephan et al, 2023;Davidsson, 2020). Yet, this event is far from one-off; the global economy was frequently in crisis earlier (e.g.…”

“…The global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a wave of research on SMEs' survival and performance in crisis times (e.g. Browder et al, 2022;Stephan et al, 2023;Crick et al, 2023;Protogerou et al, 2022). In most cases, these studies have been motivated by the role that small and medium-sized firms play in the development of a prosperous market economy and by the fact that SMEs are more vulnerable and less resistant to crisis events because they generally have fewer resources to adapt to crisis (Humphries et al, 2020).…”