Repurposing without purpose? Early innovation responses to the COVID‐19 crisis: Evidence from clinical trials

ABSTRACT: The novel coronavirus has created one of the biggest social and economic challenges in recent decades. Since a critical issue in overcoming a large‐scale pandemic involves finding effective treatments for the disease, there is typically urgent pressure on the health‐care sector to develop innovations to combat the pandemic. Recently, scholars have argued that repurposing – that is, reusing an existing innovation in a different context – allows for such rapid innovation responses and can reduce costs, as the groundwork has already been laid. In this paper, we compare these benefits with the considerable disadvantages associated with innovation repurposing, including lowered barriers to entry, which can lead to declining average quality and duplicate work. Using data on 2,456 COVID‐19‐relate

SUBMITTER: Hanisch M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8014695 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature