Exploring the Open COVID Pledge in the fight against COVID-19: A Semantic Analysis of the Manifesto, the Pledgors and the Featured Patents

Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has stimulated urgent innovative responses to tackle the current crisis and unveil new trajectories enabling recovery as early as possible. In the quest for solutions to the pandemic, organizations have been forced to join efforts with an unprecedented number of different stakeholders, including competitors, rising new appropriation-related challenges. To ease these issues and facilitate collaborative efforts, some initiatives have come into being to encourage the release of Intellectual Property (IP) rights to unlock new possibilities from their use and possibly foster the collective innovation process. The Open COVID Pledge (OCP) stands out as the most visible project that has gained momentum at the international level, as it has increasingly involved well-known top-patenting companies, willing to publicly commit to making their IP relevant to COVID-19 freely available. Drawing from all the available information (the World Wide Web, the participating companies' press releases and official websites, and the documents of pledged patents), we propose a research design, applying a semantic method to allow an augmented understanding of the main characteristics of this pledge. Our findings point out that the OCP has got a great media resonance on the overall web, also thanks to the commitment of large top-patenting pledgors; results also show that while the official communications of the participant companies resemble very much the general OCP Manifesto of providing free access to their patent portfolio, the semantic analysis of the pledged patents unveils details on available technologies that mostly refer to the real-time search and analysis of information and devices for the detection of the diffusion of the virus. Overall, this analysis contributes to providing contextual information on the available IP, towards the desired direction of putting the pledge to work and have an impact on follow-on innovation, which represents the underlying rationale of the initiative in the fight against COVID-19.