Exploring the Open COVID Pledge in the fight against COVID‐19: a semantic analysis of the Manifesto, the pledgors and the featured patents

Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has stimulated urgent innovative responses to tackle the current crisis and unveil new trajectories enabling recovery as early possible. In quest for solutions pandemic, organizations have been forced join efforts with an unprecedented number of different stakeholders, including competitors, rising appropriation-related challenges. To ease these issues facilitate collaborative efforts, some initiatives come into being encourage release Intellectual Property (IP) rights unlock possibilities from their use possibly foster collective innovation process. The Open COVID Pledge (OCP) stands out most visible project that gained momentum at international level, it increasingly involved well-known top-patenting companies, willing publicly commit making IP relevant COVID-19 freely available. Drawing all available information (the World Wide Web, participating companies' press releases official websites, documents pledged patents), we propose a research design, applying semantic method allow augmented understanding main characteristics this pledge. Our findings point OCP got great media resonance on overall web, also thanks commitment large pledgors; results show while communications participant companies resemble very much general Manifesto providing free access patent portfolio, analysis patents unveils details technologies mostly refer real-time search devices detection diffusion virus. Overall, contributes contextual IP, towards desired direction putting pledge work impact follow-on innovation, which represents underlying rationale initiative in fight against COVID-19.