INTRODUCTION
The powerful “maker” response to the COVID-19 pandemic presents a
conundrum to researchers. Maker spaces are known as places attracting
people who wish to break away from encumbering institutions (Furnari,
2014), but in responding to the pandemic, makers instead sought to act
in concert with local institutions. A set of actors who prided
themselves on their autonomy and non-conforming nature suddenly became a
force for public good, engaging with the bureaucratic domains of large
health systems and governments. In attempting to move from the periphery
to engage with core organizations, makers struggled with finding the
resources they needed and developing strategies to overcome potential
liabilities of illegitimacy (Corsini, Dammicco, & Moultrie, 2020).
During the early months of the COVID-19 crisis, managers of disaster
response plans and supply chains struggled to meet exponentially growing
needs (Ranney et al., 2020). Many actors in the maker community
activated latent network nodes to self-organize a response that was
simultaneously geographically distributed and locally focused, without
oversight from the public or private sectors (Lunny, 2020; Thompson,
2020). Groups of makers quickly repurposed personal and organizational
resources, such as 3D printers and sewing machines, as they experimented
with the local production of items such as ventilators, ultraviolet
decontamination machines, and personal protective equipment (PPE)
(Clark, 2020; Crowley, 2020; McCue, 2020; Petri, 2020). The scale and
scope of their mobilization make this an important case for studying
resource-constrained innovation in entrepreneurial spaces and
interdependent social networks (Casciaro, 2020; Corsini et al., 2021;
Korsgaard et al., 2020; Vesci et al., 2021).
The heterogeneous community of makers that responded to the need for PPE
during COVID-19 consisted of do-it-yourself hobbyists, engineers,
artisans, hackers, students, and small-batch manufacturers with varying
degrees of expertise in design, textiles, prototyping, and digital and
traditional fabrication. Over the last two decades, this diverse group
of actors has collaborated to varying extents on projects in shared
digital and physical spaces, including thousands of innovation workshops
and fabrication facilities known as maker spaces (Browder et al., 2019;
Halbinger, 2018; Mortara & Parisot, 2016). As the global pandemic
spread, the maker community responded with an outpouring of
entrepreneurial responses. Examples include a workgroup for the 1750
worldwide Fab Labs (Fab Cloud, 2020), virtual product development among
Wikifactory’s 20,000 members (Viral Response, 2020), and a maker space
establishing a multi-city PPE collective across India (Maker’s Asylum,
2020).
We draw upon findings from previous studies to inform our investigation
of the conditions under which emergent maker networks effectively
facilitated the production and distribution of PPE during COVID-19. We
define response effectiveness as how well a particular response
initiative achieves scale in the number of solutions provided, offers a
varied scope of goods or services, delivers solutions with speed, and
customizes solutions to meet the specific needs of those affected by the
crisis (Dutton et al., 2006). Response effectiveness depends upon the
resourcing approaches actors take to bundling and recombining existing
resources, as well searching for new resources (Williams & Shepherd,
2018).
Studying the forms and temporal evolution of different crisis response
networks can help us identify the constraints organizations faced and
how those limitations can be overcome (Casciaro, 2020). Investigating
the complete redesign or de novo development of production and
distribution functions by ordinary people acting entrepreneurially
(Shepherd, 2020) can advance our understanding of resource coordination
under conditions of uncertainty (Sullivan & Ford, 2014). Our research
can also shed light on how learning during the rapid, exponential spread
of a threat to public health and safety, such as a pandemic, truncates,
accelerates or otherwise alters expected stages of the entrepreneurial
process (Lumpkin & Lichtenstein, 2005).
We explore how variations in network composition affect the production,
distribution and use of PPE through comparative case studies of four
maker networks that emerged in cities in the United States. We trace the
temporal evolution of maker networks and identify factors that affected
the extent to which crisis responses were effective. We find that key
factors include strategies for learning about resourcefulness in the
face of constraints, legitimation, and self-organizing within networks.
These findings extend our understanding of the interplay of learning,
resources, and legitimacy in collective action and entrepreneurship
processes.