In late February 2020, The Global Institute on Innovation Districts sent letters to approximately 75 districts and other geographies of innovation to learn whether their innovation actors—research institutions, R&D labs, companies, and other actors—were advancing research on COVID-19. Based on the response, The Global Institute documented the research activities of seven innovation districts in a March 2020 article.
Since that time, 11 additional geographies of innovation have come forward to share their research, prompting an update of the original article.
In April 2020, nearly two months after we reached out to innovation district globally, the pandemic has intensified exponentially, now impacting at least 183 countries around the world. Since the outbreak in China, innovation geographies have been leveraging their assets to better understand and find solutions to COVID-19. Their assets include pools of highly trained academic researchers; essential innovation infrastructure, such as laboratories with specific biosafety standards; the advanced technologies and Big Data needed for modeling; and a network of peers, both local and global, that helps us better understand the complexities of COVID-19.
Read more at the Global Institute on Innovation Districts.
