Crisis-Driven Innovation: Lessons from Tunisian Makers Response to COVID-19

International audience COVID-19 has required the rapid deployment of innovations to address the multiple challenges imposed by the pandemic. From 3D-printed face shields to turning snorkelling masks into respirators, this paper describes how the Tunisian makers’ community is supporting the public healthcare system to properly fight this crisis. More clearly it intends to shed light on the role of the makers’ community in supporting the healthcare systems by proposing Open source innovations. It illustrates how a crisis can create spontaneously a need for innovation and open up opportunities for ecosystem stakeholders to collaborate in a new way. Accordingly, a process model of crisis-driven collaborative innovation based on 3D printing technology is proposed in order to highlight the different stages which started with a local model of collaborative-social-innovation, and has evolved towards a framework of a collaborative ecosystem with a national scope, leading eventually to product industrialization. Main learning and contributions of the papers are presented in the conclusion.