“OPER.TEN” Transform Emergency Now! Facing Covid-19 with Open Innovation and Human Centered Design

The paper presents “OPER.TEN”, a ten days program that hybridized Human Centered Design (HCD) with Open innovation (OI), developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The program adapted an HCD methodology to face the challenges of designing during a pandemic, such as relying on remote interactions only. The article presents methodological challenges as well as tools and methods developed to overcome those challenges. OPER.TEN, Transform Emergency Now! is a hybrid methodology that relies on HCD and OI tools and principles. OPER. TEN ensures fast implementation of the results involving stakeholders of the territory with implementation capacity. The final network involved Universities, Companies, Municipalities, and Government. After the design phase, three of the four solutions were successfully implemented. Results report how to hybridize an HCD with OI to push rapid implementations.


INTRODUCTION
The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated how helpful Human Centered Design (HCD) responses are, in understanding the worldviews and ecosystems for users (White et al., 2020). More specifically, Design Hacking demonstrated their central role in creating our future individual, community, and social ecosystems (White et al., 2020). Against a pandemic, speed is crucial, and open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003(Chesbrough, , 2019 (OI) helps to empower the human capital distributed around the world to launch rapid testing of possible solutions (Chesbrough, 2020). This article aims to show "OPER.TEN", a program that links university, industry, government, public, and the environment to push fast implementation. The program methodology hybridizes an HCD approach with OI. The approach also includes suggestions to overcome problems that the design team had to face during the pandemic (e.g., keeping relationships virtual). As a result, the program was able to rapidly produce testable solutions concepts that have been successfully implemented to tackle the pandemic challenges.
adequate representation of the ongoing transformation from the "design for" to the "design with" mindset with her evolving map of design practice and design research. She focused on "People Centered Innovation" as a cluster that included participatory design and user centered design methods, halfway between research-led and design-led approaches. We can resume this as a field of action in which multidisciplinary experts interact with stakeholders and users, stimulating each other during a research process that applies participatory methods and applied ethnography to identify issues and problems otherwise invisible, codesign solutions, and test it through fast prototyping. According to the ISO 924-210, the HCD approach aims at designing a solution that meets users' requirements through a structured process, as shown in Figure 1. . "OPER. TEN  The HCD process lifespan depends on various factors, such as the number of design iterations that allow understanding the needs of the people involved in the research, empathizing with them, and then developing a tested solution concept. However, based on the authors' experience, on several case studies (e.g., the IDEO field guide to human centered design 1 ), and assessments on the duration of each HCD phase (Maguire, 2001), the HCD process duration is measured in months.

Open Innovation (OI)
In the management literature, OI is defined as "a distributed innovation process that involves purposively managed knowledge flows across the organizational boundary" (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014) (p. 3). With a broader perspective, OI is described as a shift from the traditional closed innovation paradigm (where organizations have full control of their knowledge and do not cooperate to innovate) towards open models of collaboration (Gassmann and Enkel, 2004;Enkel et al., 2009). In those models, organizations acknowledge the value of external competences and know-how and choose to exploit both internal as well as external ideas. These open models of collaboration include many actors who gained increasing importance in collaborating with firms during the OI era, such as Startups, Spinoffs, Venture capitalists, Employees, Lead users, Individuals, Inventors, Innovators, and, among all, Universities. In particular, since the diffusion of the Technology Transfer Offices, university efforts to commercialize science have evolved (Kochenkova et al., 2016), and new pathways are emerging, such as the spin-off creation based on research results , crowdfunding of entrepreneurial projects (Meoli et al., 2019), and an interesting novel approach relates to the activation of OI initiative (Enkel et al., 2009). Over the years, several companies have used Hackathons (Mohajer Soltani et al., 2014) and other OI forms to generate creative ideas (Dahlander and Wallin, 2020), involving universities in their programs. In particular, the typical Design Hackathon process lasts from 1 to 3 days, focusing on developing an idea through rapid prototypes (e.g., sketches, digital interfaces, mockups), as shown in Figure 2.   In these short-term and intensive events called hackathons, participants aim at developing working prototypes as a possible solution to a beforehand well-defined problem (Mohajer Soltani et al., 2014).

Universities initiatives based on OI and HCD related to Covid-19 emergency
In these times of crisis, Universities launched several OI and HCD initiatives.

METHODOLOGY
Among all the OI forms, the Design Hackathon approach has recently been hybridized with HCD to overcome the problem of obtaining technologically impressive solutions that lack a deep understanding of the problems from the users' point of view (Taylor and Sherman, 2020). According to this perspective, in the middle of a severe pandemic, it was necessary to "humanize" Hackathons and speed up HCD efforts to deliver fast implementations.
OPER.TEN 7 (Transform Emergency Now! 10 days for a change) is a program that links university, industry, government, public, and the environment through multidisciplinary teams of students. OPER.TEN links OI and HCD approaches (as described in chapter 1) to take advantage of the synergy of both: in facts, users, stakeholder, and experts have been asked to cooperate in the research and to design the development of solutions to four Mincolelli, G.,  challenges related to the phase 1 of the Italian Covid-19 emergency. Private and public organizations and companies patronized the four challenges. innovation design professionals who work at the OPER.SPACE OI center -and had the opportunity to rely on a network of professors, experts, and professionals related to the three Universities. The main actors involved throughout the program are described in Table   2. 4. How might we enhance citizens to practice remote activities during the lock-down to be connected, informed, and keep up with their professional and educational path? The

HCD methodology for Covid-19
The HCD approach reported in Table 3 was adapted to face Covid-19 challenges, such as the fact that the design team could not meet users for interviews or observe them in the context.
The teaching team developed a vademecum for remote design research and cooperation to ensure a homogeneous and significant effort by all the teams and reduce coordination time.
It provided tips and online tools suggestion like the following:

OI for faster implementation
Innovation is often measured in terms of expected costs, but in the middle of a severe pandemic, all these issues are far less critical than the capability to deliver a solution sooner (Chesbrough, 2020  After the end of the final presentation, to guarantee a real social impact, the design team (or the coach) worked for some other days with the identified partner to transfer the knowledge and support the partner in becoming the implementation champion. To do this, the design team prepared an implementation roadmap with the selected partner. Once the organization involves a larger circle of employees for the implementation phase, the design team helps the company team to go through the implementation roadmap so that the solution can come to life.

RESULTS
In the middle of a pandemic such as Covid-19, the most relevant variable that should be considered to analyze an innovative intervention's impact is its rapid implementation. Either the solution is implemented now, or it makes no sense to pursue it. The OPER.TEN program was designed to quickly implement solutions to help people in dealing with Covid-19 and 40 days after the completion of OPER.TEN three of four solutions were implemented (Digitali e Uguali 8 , Esci i nonni 9 , Kit-Insegna). We report, as a reference for readers, cards presenting the implemented solutions in the Appendix. To succeed in this, the program identified challenges relevant in the Covid-19 scenario and suggested codesign online tools to the design teams, so that an HCD approach could be implemented despite social distancing. It was the first time that design teams (and coaching and teaching teams) had to question the effectiveness of many of the traditional field research and co-design tools because of the covid contextual factors. Empathy, which is such a precious result of direct interaction between people and designers, was not anymore achievable in the usual way. The  DOI: 10.4013/sdrj.2020.133.28 was able to access a city association (AUSER), the School district Office, a teacher of a school (IC5), and a family with a child in need to test the full service of a donation of a computer to a student within one day. Even if this is a preliminary result based on a few case studies, we believe that the OPER.TEN programs could also contribute to empowering other Human Centered Design Open Innovation efforts to face the Covid-19 pandemic, and -more generally -to shed light on OI bundled with HCD as a process that should be taken into consideration to address complex social challenges in emergencies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to all the collaborative networks involved. We express a big thanks for the effort in making OPER.TEN possible to the coaching team, composed of Alberto Miti, Alice Colombo, Elahe Rajabiani, Eleonora Musca, Francesco D'Onghia, Mario Di Nauta, Michael Oggionni, Silvia Marchini.  (personal computers, smartphones, tablets) in the middle of a pandemic. This matter of fact leads these families in isolation and brings difficulties in adapting to the new remote practices. Incredibly, only one in four Italian children have the instruments they need to take part in education from their homes' safety. Thus, the design team carried out a survey collecting 85 answers highlighting that 45% of families own unused devices, whose 63% is still working. The survey also figured out that 53% of families that own unused devices are willing to donate. To test these results, the design team developed a prototype, asking the reached families to donate their device, which led to the identification of 20 smartphones, 11 personal computers, and six tablets ready to be donated. As described by the design team itself, the emergent design context is shown in the figure below (Source: OPER.TEN final presentation).

ENDNOTES APPENDIX
Thus, the design team prototyped and implemented a system to connect Michele (the donor) and Anna (the beneficiary). The design team helped Michele in backing-up, resetting, and sanitizing, partnered with Auser, a courier service that delivered the device and helped Anna correctly set the personal computer donated in terms of first access and use of equipment. The team went through a specific learning process that helped them figure out most of the problems needed to be addressed to design and implement such a system. To sum up, the design team probed people's participation through a survey and prototyped the whole service by delivering one laptop to a child by the end of the project. The developed solution is a digital platform -called Digitali E Uguali to connect people who have surplus devices with children who need them to attend remote school lessons. The project involved two institutions acting as developers for the online platform (Yoox Net-A-Porter Group and the Municipality of Bologna) and a logistic partner to collect and transport the device (Auser). The platform has been active online since the 8th of May, which means just 33 days after the end of the process. The CEO of Yoox Net-A-Porter, the partner company engaged during the program, stated, "We have already donated hundreds of laptops ourselves. I invite you as individuals and businesses to donate via the platform".)