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.