Successful Models of Hackathons and Innovation Contests to Crowdsource Rapid Responses to COVID-19

Abstract

To help fighting the many adversarial effects that the COVID-19 pandemic brought, many initiatives supported by public, private and non-governmental organizations are crowdsourcing the development of solutions through hackathons and innovation contests. This article discusses the models and common aspects of two successful initiatives led by governmental institutions that used a crowdsourcing approach to foster solutions aiming at pandemic-related issues: the EUVsVirus (Europe) and the MPLabs COVID-19 Challenge (Brazil).