Surpass the Virus through Innovations in emergence – SURVIE

The Pandemic COVID-19 has impacted strongly the habitual activities in numerous sectors, such as healthcare, businesses, transportation services and educational institutions. With the end of confinement and the progressive return to professional on-site activity, there is an opportunity to innovate in order to face the challenges that have arisen and continue to face each organization. In this action-research, a participatory innovation action will be organized in five sites corresponding to five professional settings (transport, general hospital maternities, startup business, university, specialized hospital) to foster the emergence of new solutions to workplace-related problems raised by COVID-19. This innovation challenge consists of a process in which a "problem statement" is formulated, people involved in the organization contribute their ideas on a platform to collect ideas, qualified judges from each organization examine and select the most promising ideas, the organization promotes these ideas for new practices. During this 6 week process, researchers specialized in creativity and innovation will observe, trace the activity, and analyze the participatory innovation action in each organization. Then, researchers will be able to report on the impact, in terms of ideas generated, the value of the ideas for each organization, and the impact on participants' well being in their workplace. The organizations involved are : the CHGR (a specialized hospital in Britanny), a network of Maternities in eastern France (Champagne-Ardennes-Lorraine region), a university faculty (Aix Marseille engineering faculty), SNCF-Transilien (RER Paris region transport), OCUS (a french startup in the international cultural industry sector). Specifications (AFNOR SPECS) will be identified for an optimized process that can benefit other sites, in diverse organizational settings. This action-research will therefore provide a proof-of-concept that participatory innovation, in the period following a pandemic crisis event can be used to facilitate the improved resilience of organizations, providing new , useful ideas to the problems faced, with economic value and improved social well-being.