Co-Immune: a case study on open innovation for vaccination hesitancy and access

Background: The rise of major complex public health problems, such as vaccination hesitancy and access to vaccination, requires innovative, open and transdisciplinary approaches. In spite of this, institutional silos, paywalls and lack of participation of non-academic citizens in the design of solutions hamper efforts to meet these challenges. Against this background, new solutions have been explored, with participatory research, citizen science, hackathon and challenge-based approaches being applied in the context of public health. Objectives: Our ambition was to develop a framework for creating citizen science and open innovation projects that address the contemporary challenges of vaccination in France and around the globe. Methods: We designed and implemented Co-Immune, a programme created to tackle the question of vaccination hesitancy and access to vaccination through an online and offline challenge-based open innovation approach. The programme was run on the open science platform Just One Giant Lab. Results: Over a 6-month period, the Co-Immune programme gathered 234 participants of diverse backgrounds and 13 partners from the public and private sectors and organized 8 events to facilitate the creation of 20 new projects as well as the continuation of 2 existing projects to address the issues of vaccination hesitancy and access, ranging from app development and data mining to analysis and game design. In an open framework, the projects made their data, code, and solutions publicly available. Conclusion: Co-Immune highlights how open innovation approaches and online platforms can help to gather and coordinate non-institutional communities in a rapid, distributed and global way towards solving public health issues. Through the ideas of hackathons and other contest approaches, such initiatives can lead to the production and transfer of knowledge, creating novel solutions in the public health sector. The example of Co-Immune contributes to paving the way for organisations and individuals to collaboratively tackle future global challenges.