Learned Resourcefulness
Makers learned a great deal about how to be resourceful while facing
significant resource constraints. By acting entrepreneurially while many
resource conditions were outside their control (Stevenson & Jarillo,
1990), makers pursued five learned resourcefulness strategies to boost
their response effectiveness: improvising, focusing, satisficing,
configuring, and brokering.
Improvising. Much of the early activity in responding to the
pandemic was marked by eager and plentiful experimentation with
potential PPE designs, as indicated by the flurry of participation on
social media and sharing of designs online. While many makers were
familiar with prototyping and iterating designs, the nature of the
pandemic necessitated improvisation with unfamiliar materials and
production techniques. Different clusters varied in the extent to which
they readily adopted popular face shield designs that emerged within the
worldwide maker community or developed their own. Improvisation also
varied in the degree to which it was informed by recipient input,
creating differing feedback loops to enable customization to local
needs. A maker in Edgeville explained, “I remember giving [a
clinician] a few different styles and sizes of ear savers, and her
nurse buddies figuring out which ones they liked more. So, [I was]
pivoting the design files that I was using based on that real world
feedback.”
Focusing. For many makers, learned resourcefulness involved
resisting the creative allure of inventing new designs. The pressure to
respond with urgency created tension between the need to produce the
best designs at scale and the plentiful ideas with which makers often
experimented. A network organizer in Triport stated, “[The way]
maker people do things, everybody wants to make their own version of
something. Eventually, we just put the kibosh on that.” Strong
decision-making leadership within emergent groups proved to be a
critical component in helping makers focus their PPE efforts.
Groups varied in the extent to which they focused and how quickly they
focused, leading us to conclude that more focused groups produced
quicker responses to the crisis. An independent maker space leader in
Midburg explained how feedback from a hospital eventually helped them
focus:
The biggest [obstacle] was at the beginning and trying to
figure out what was a safe way to contribute… It just seemed like
there was such a rush of people wanting to help and having some
resources and not knowing what the best direction to direct your efforts
was. It wasn’t until that call with [a hospital] where we realized
that, really, the only feasible way for us to engage was with face
shields.
The need to focus production on specific types of PPE rather than
creatively experiment with a variety of PPE was critical to an effective
crisis response. Yet, the tension also took its toll on volunteers whose
skills, interests, and resources were not ultimately well-suited for
scaling production indefinitely (Barker & Gump, 1964).
Satisficing. Even as makers learned to focus their work on
specific types of PPE, they regularly resorted to satisficing, or making
do with “good enough” solutions deemed adequate but far from optimal
(Simon, 1987). Satisficing reflected a conscious trade-off decision
between providing stop-gap solutions and the high quality craftsmanship
of “custom, bespoke, artisanal PPE” that one informant in Stilton
joked about.
Recipients of maker-produced PPE expressed an initial tolerance for
satisficing, given their dire need. An administrator in a public agency
stated, “We knew it wasn’t the perfect solution. But we knew we had to
give [our employees] something to protect them as soon as possible
because we knew that this was a gravely dangerous virus.
And so, something was better than nothing.” Over time, however, some
recipients in larger institutions found that imperfectly matched initial
solutions compounded user difficulties with PPE in their organizations.
More often, recipients would simply not re-order PPE from makers. A
sewing-cluster organizer in Midburg cited a 20% reorder rate as a
success. A maker space member in Stilton expressed concern, “We very
rarely got repeat requests. That’s a bad metric… You want repeat
customers… It’s speculative as to why. Maybe they got what they
needed and made it last. Maybe they found another source… I have
no idea.” Thus, the dotted feedback arrow in Figure 2 represents the
incomplete information makers received to inform continuous learning
about how their resourcefulness might improve their crisis response.
Configuring. The logistical implications of resource
constraints required makers to be creative in how they configured their
physical and human resources. While some maker spaces or small business
workshops managed to utilize their facilities for portions of their PPE
production process, each case in our study included numerous examples of
distributed production. Even when maker spaces played a central role in
a network, as indicated by our initial research design in Figure 1,
individuals often carried out extensive production and delivery
activities in their homes and personal cars. Frequently, this was
necessitated by business shut-downs and stay-at-home orders. Many makers
chose to relocate equipment such as 3D printers from universities and
corporations – with or without permission – when they encountered
prohibitive institutional policies and/or administrator trepidation over
liability concerns. Public statements from makers referred to the
“liberating” of equipment from institutions to put it in service of
the public good, typically asserted with a hint of pride at defeating
institutional constraints.
As makers learned to creatively configure the physical resources of
equipment and production space, they also learned about configuring
volunteer roles and labor. Numerous staffing adjustments were made to
improve the degree of fit between the people available to help and the
tasks required to be performed (Barker & Gump, 1964). For example,
teams formed to specialize as couriers or in ordering materials from
suppliers. Roles such as these might arise within an existing
organization, but entirely new organized nodes also emerged to fulfill
them. For example, in Midburg, Triport and Stilton, groups of medical
students dedicated their volunteer efforts to facilitating the delivery
of PPE produced by others. Overall, learning about configuring resources
helped maker networks modify their processes for responding to the
crisis.
Brokering. As makers of all types initially self-organized
during the network emergence stage, a key goal was to take stock of as
many potential boundary spanning positions as could be identified (Burt,
2005). Family members, friends or neighbors who worked in any capacity
at hospitals were considered to be potential connections to leverage for
learning how to help and navigate unfamiliar institutions (Clement et
al., 2018). A leader at a maker space in an entrepreneurial support
organization in Triport described her social ties:
I had relationships within the health systems that may not have
been the right contact for what they were looking for, but they knew
what [our organization] was and what we were capable of doing. They
were making calls to places like us, or we were making calls into
them… It was just relationships we already had.
Brokerage activities were pervasive in the network evolution stage as
makers learned to improve their social resourcefulness to collaborate
within and between clusters (Bradley, 2015).
Our analysis revealed heterogeneity across cases in the extent to which
people were positioned to take advantage of existing institutional ties
and turn them into brokerage positions. We also observed variation
makers’ ability to develop new brokerage ties for the PPE cause. An
informant from Midburg served as the sole clinical consultant for a
large maker space as well as for the other nodes in its cluster. Even
though this individual was not in a position of influence in a hospital,
the existence of hospital ties gave them the social capital required for
gathering and sharing knowledge within the maker community (Burt, 1999).
In a separate cluster in Midburg, a maker succeeded in creating
brokerage relationships by forging new ties to city hospital
administrators through perseverance. The lack of coordination between
these parallel clusters in Midburg illustrates how one was path
dependent via existing ties and the other’s brokerage ability led to
entrepreneurial path-creating activities (Hallen et al., 2020; Sullivan
& Ford, 2014). The latter example involved a high degree of learned
resourcefulness related to brokerage, which increased their
effectiveness in distributing its PPE to area hospitals.
Summary of learned resourcefulness under resource limitations.What the organizations in each case study learned about improving their
resourcefulness shaped the outcomes they achieved. Although the
organizations represented in our data were all able to produce large
quantities of PPE from a maker vantage point, they varied in the
resourcefulness strategies they learned to implement and how quickly
they mastered them. They also received differing degrees of feedback
about the effectiveness of their PPE, either enhancing or inhibiting
their ability to learn more about how to improve their ongoing
improvising, focusing, satisficing, configuring, and brokering
activities.
What the networks learned about their response effectiveness influenced
the breadth of their activities beyond the production of PPE, especially
in deciding to engage in planning for a future crisis. In Stilton, for
example, the cluster with four maker spaces transitioned to outsourced
manufacturing in China for some components as well as purchasing of PPE
to deliver through the channels of distribution it established initially
for its own PPE. In Edgeville, a maker space leader described how, once
they saw the potential to help with PPE in the short-term, they also
broadened their vision to help with the economic impact of the crisis on
small businesses. Organizations that described their crisis response
mission more broadly than PPE production alone also expressed plans to
formalize their availability to help in future crises. In these
instances, makers viewed their efforts not as temporary organizations
that had served a short-term purpose (Bakker et al., 2016), but as a
network that could be reactivated for other crises by leveraging
relationships and brokerage dynamics they hoped would persist (Kwon et
al., 2020). Organizations that viewed their crisis response more
narrowly tended to say that the maker community’s PPE effort was an
achievement unto itself, as it allowed makers to feel like they could
make a difference during the pandemic.