Abstract
PurposeThe study analyses the role that open social innovation (OSI) perspective played for Fondazione Banco Alimentare Onlus (FBAO), a food bank in Italy, in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. It answers the following research question: how does a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulate the adoption of OSI practices to revamp the activities of FBAO and facilitate appropriate solutions to carry out its social mission?Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a qualitative approach. It is based on a single case study.FindingsThe study shows how COVID-19 has stimulated the adoption of OSI practices to continue to meet the social mission, creating innovative projects or finding new ways to do the same things.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is based on a single case study.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes insights into the literature on OSI, examining how inbound and outbound OSI mechanisms can modify business models and increase the adaptation capacity of food banks and their effectiveness. In addition, it provides a rich context in which the social value drivers provided by OSI are studied.Originality/valueThis paper applies the OSI to a food bank to evaluate what this action mode produces for the food bank during a health crisis. Specifically, this is the first paper that studies the COVID-19 crisis response of a food bank from the OSI perspective, focusing on the inbound and outbound OSI processes that characterized the entire network of relationships.
Highlights
The rapid outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an alarming global health crisis (Kraus et al, 2020)
Considering the specificities of food banks, we focus on the open social innovation (OSI) perspective (Chalmers, 2012; Chesbrough and Di Minin, 2014)
Our study focuses on how OSI can help food banks innovate their business models and operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, in an attempt to answer this research question: How does a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulate the adoption of OSI practices to revamp the activities of Fondazione Banco Alimentare Onlus (FBAO), and find appropriate solutions to carry out its social mission?
Summary
The rapid outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an alarming global health crisis (Kraus et al, 2020). In the absence of effective short-term medical responses to the virus (the ongoing vaccine or other treatments), several regions and entire countries have been entirely locked down with the implementation of a full curfew (Ferguson et al, 2020). The COVID-19 crisis has affected the entire food supply chain system. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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