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.