BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Faculty at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business are using innovative methods and their personal resources in the battle against the novel coronavirus pandemic that has now affected the lives of more than 8,200 Hoosiers and nearly 590,000 people nationwide.
Many of those efforts arose from an “Idea Sprint” organized by several management and entrepreneurship professors. They pulled together more than 200 entrepreneurs, coders, engineers, medical doctors, nurses, venture capitalists and other business professionals, who worked virtually and developed 19 potential solutions for problems arising from COVID-19.
Participants came from all across the United States and Canada and from four other continents, Australia, Europe, Asia and South America. The initiative was organized in just three days and led to the development of social initiatives addressing issues such as the shortage of surgical masks, grocery stock outs, displaced workers, small business matchmaking and online educational challenges now impacting students across the country.
“We all know there are great ideas out there related to this crisis. We wanted to find a way to quickly bring entrepreneurs, medical professionals, and technologists from around the world together to work intensively on solutions,” said one of the organizers, Regan Stevenson (pictured right), assistant professor of entrepreneurship and management and the John and Donna Shoemaker Faculty Fellow. “In order to do this, we knew we needed to move fast and step outside the institutional structure to get this movement off the ground immediately.” (more…)