Crowdsourcing STI policy solutions to COVID-19

The coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis presents exceptional challenges across all aspects of public policy. Within the context of science, technology and innovation (STI), governments are increasingly seeking to draw on society’s full potential for innovation, using collective intelligence. By efficiently harnessing the knowledge and expertise of groups, and focusing this on specific research, innovation and policy problems, such approaches could help governments address the current pandemic, as well as future crises. This brief provides an overview of several approaches, including innovation prizes, prediction markets; and, support for open source and other online engineering projects. All of these approaches could complement existing STI policies.