Abstract
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, comprehensive, accurate, and timely digital contact tracing serves as a decisive measure in curbing viral transmission. Such a strategy integrates corporate innovation, government decision‐making, citizen participation, and community coordination with big data analytics. This article explores how key stakeholders in an open innovation ecosystem interact within the digital context to overcome challenges to public health and socio‐economic welfare imposed by the pandemic. To enhance the digital contact tracing effectiveness, communities are deployed to moderate the interactions between government, enterprises and citizens. As an example, we study the community‐based digital contact tracing in Wuhan, a representative case of China’s ‘virus exceptionalism’ in COVID‐19 mitigation. We discuss the effectiveness of this strategy and raise critical ethical concerns regarding decision‐making in R&D management.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic imposes enormous challenges to public health and socioeconomic welfare
Embedded in an open innovation ecosystem, digital contact tracing embodies the big data analytics of public health information, which depends on four key components – pooled internal and external data sources generated by the individual citizens, data transformation processes facilitated by the enterprises, tools of data analysis and sharing platforms moderated by the communities, and data application outputs by the government (Raghupathi & Raghupathi, 2014)
The community-based digital contact tracing incorporates enterprise innovation, citizen participation, and government decision-making in the open innovation ecosystem and, in turn, contributes to the completeness and timeliness of big data analytics to contain the viral spread (Chun et al, 2010, Greve, 2015, Kretzschmar et al, 2020)
Summary
Decoding China’s Covid-19 “Virus Exceptionalism”: Community-based Digital Contact Tracing in Wuhan. Decoding China’s COVID-19 ‘Virus Exceptionalism’: Community-based Digital Contact Tracing in Wuhan. During the COVID-19 pandemic, comprehensive, accurate, and timely digital contact tracing serves as a decisive measure in curbing viral transmission. Such a strategy integrates corporate innovation, government decision-making, citizen participation, and community coordination with big data analytics. To enhance the digital contact tracing effectiveness, communities are deployed to moderate the interactions between government, enterprises and citizens. We study the community-based digital contact tracing in Wuhan, a representative case of China’s ‘virus exceptionalism’ in COVID-19 mitigation.
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