Exploring the Open COVID Pledge in the fight against COVID‐19: a semantic analysis of the Manifesto, the pledgors and the featured patents

Abstract

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.

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Exploring the Open COVID
Pledge in the ght against
COVID- 19: a semantic analysis
of the Manifesto, the pledgors
and the featured patents
Ginevra Assia Antonelli1, Maria Isabella Leone2,*
and Riccardo Ricci3
1 Department of Business and Management,LUISS University, Viale Romania, 32, Rome, 00197, Italy.
gantonelli@luiss.it
2 LUISS Business School,LUISS University, Via Nomentana, 216, Rome, 00162, Italy. mleone@luiss.it
3 Instantechnologies, Pesaro, Italy. r.ricci@instantechnologies.com
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 par-
ticipating 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 informa-
tion and devices for the detection of the diffusion of the virus. Overall, this analysis contrib-
utes 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.

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
2 R&D Management 2021
1. Introduction
The coronavirus disease- 19 (COVID- 19) pan-
demic has affected not only countries’ health
systems but also global economies, depicting times
of high uncertainty (Chesbrough, 2020; Coccia,
2020a, 2020b; Wenzel et al., 2020). At the same time,
however, the urgency to find means of enabling the
recovery has forced and led to exceptional progress
in innovation practices (Chesbrough, 2020). Firms
have experienced that their survival and success are
tied to the ability to navigate new opportunities,1
embracing a more collaborative attitude to unlock
the collective innovation ability (Chesbrough, 2020;
McGahan et al., 2021). Governments, scientists, edu-
cators and companies of different sectors have there-
fore committed themselves – sometimes for their
first times – to global collaboration on an unprece-
dented scale to cope with the effects of the pandemic
more efficiently and rapidly (Ratten, 2020; Younes
etal., 2020). The efforts committed to the develop-
ment of the COVID- 19 Open Research Dataset,2 as
well as the crowdsourcing- based industrial reconver-
sion of many manufacturing firms, represent illustra-
tive cases of this trend (Chesbrough, 2020). Overall,
this evidence has shown ‘how a sense of urgency can
truly fuel open innovation’ and stimulate the orga-
nizations to open their boundaries to jointly tackle
societal challenges (Chesbrough and Di Minin, 2014;
Chesbrough, 2020; McGahan et al., 2021, p. 55).
Nevertheless, these extraordinary Open Innovation
(OI) efforts have brought about new appropriation-
related challenges, because organizations have found
themselves collaborating with an unprecedented
number of different stakeholders, including com-
petitors (Heled et al., 2020; Moerchel et al., 2020a;
Tietze et al., 2020a, 2020b). Facing these challenges,
and to facilitate these collaborative efforts, organiza-
tions have been encouraged ‘to adopt an Intellectual
Property (IP) perspective on the currently unfolding
COVID- 19 pandemic’ and re- design and increasingly
apply IP management practices (Chesbrough, 2020;
Tietze et al., 2020a, p. 2).3 For instance, at the com-
pany level, Medtronic4 has opened its IP rights (i.e.
patents) to increase the production of efficient ven-
tilators, and Isinnova5 patented its Charlotte valve,
however, making it freely available to help hospitals.
At a collective level, there has been an increasing
adoption of patent pledges to make IP relevant to
COVID- 19 freely available to potential users. Among
these, the Open COVID Pledge (OCP)6 has gained
international resonance as it has attracted an increas-
ing number of well- known innovative companies
(such as Facebook, Intel, Microsoft and Amazon) that
have publicly married the cause. Their commitment
has spurred many complementary ‘similar programs
and initiatives [which] align squarely with those
reflected in the Pledge’,7 such as the World Health
Organization Access to COVID- 19 Tools Accelerator8
and the Open COVID- 19 Declaration9 signed by a
group of Japanese technology companies to allow
the free availability of their IP in support of stop-
ping COVID- 19 (Chesbrough, 2020; Contreras et al.,
2020; Cotè et al., 2020; Heled et al., 2020; Srinivas,
2020; Younes et al., 2020; Tietze et al., 2020a, 2020b).
Albeit patent pledges are not novel IP practices, the
COVID pandemic has revitalized their adoption and
diffusion, especially for those classified as ‘mission-
oriented’, pursuing philanthropic objectives, such as
the growth of social welfare through faster recovery
from the crisis (Maggiolino and Montagnani, 2017;
Contreras, 2018; Contreras et al., 2020; Tietze et al.,
2020a, 2020b). Given the relevance of this large-
scale collective pledge, leading scholars and practi-
tioners have stimulated the debate about how to put
this pledge to work,10 towards the desired direction
to stimulate follow- on innovations and hence find
factual solutions to the pandemic (Contreras et al.,
2019; Chesbrough, 2020). In fact, related evidence
suggested that simply publishing patent lists seldom
results in follow- on innovations in the absence of
contextual information on the complex technologies
at stake (Contreras et al., 2019).
Inspired by this debate, the paper aims to pro-
vide an augmented understanding of OCP’s main
characteristics, which may inform potential users.
Aiming at this, we also contribute to responding to
the call for dissemination of these emerging best
practice actions to aid current and future efforts in
the fight against COVID- 19.11 To do so, by apply-
ing the text mining approach and semantic methods
to all the available information on the OCP, we pur-
sued a threefold study along the following directions
of: (1) understanding how the overall web resonates
with the Initiative and the main related concepts
(OCP Manifesto Overview); (2) comprehending the
nature of pledgors’ commitment (OCP Pledgors
Overview); and (3) deep diving on the characteris-
tics and contents of the pledged IP portfolio (OCP
Patents Overview).
Based on the semantic analysis, we found that the
OCP has attracted a huge amount of interest from the
overall web and this is also confirmed by the glo-
balization of the movement that has stimulated, and
still does, an increased number of complementary
efforts all around the globe from different types of
organizations.12 What is also interesting is the band-
wagon effect of some of the big companies, such as

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 3
Microsoft, Amazon, Seagate and Morgan Stanley,
which catalyze most of the relations that have
emerged to the surface. Second, our findings reveal
that the pledgors’ participation statements sound very
similar and broad, and the main words that emerged
from the semantic analysis are all centered around
the OCP Manifesto to make their IP freely available.
Hence, the patent analysis has offered richer insights,
as it allowed to understand the content of the pledged
technologies, which overall seems to be related to
the real- time search and analysis of information and
devices for the detection of the diffusion of the virus.
The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows: Section2 provides the theoretical background
of the study, recalling the extant literature on the OI
and IP management practices, with a specific men-
tion to patent pledges, concerning the pandemic.
Section3 introduces the OCP initiative as a setting
of our study and describes the applied research meth-
odology. Section 4 presents the discussion of the
results of the analysis across the three studies (OCP
Manifesto Overview; OCP Pledgors Overview; and
OCP Patents Overview); finally, Section5 finalizes
the paper, highlighting the implications and limita-
tions of the study and putting forward future avenues
of research.
2. Theoretical background
As the OI principles are increasingly diffused, firms
are more frequently engaged in collaboration activ-
ity with external and diverse partners; it, therefore,
becomes imperative for them to decide whether and
to what extent they should be open but still capable of
capturing value from their internal R&D investments.
The relevant literature has called this appropriation
dilemma the ‘Open Innovation paradox’, because of
the inherent tension between the firms’ urgent neces-
sity of sharing and the everlasting need of protecting
the source of their competitive advantage (Bogers,
2011; Di Minin and Faems, 2013; Laursen and Salter,
2014; Arora et al., 2016; Leone, 2016).
Besides investigating the conditions under which
is more severe, such as in the case of collaboration
with universities or research organizations, authors
have also suggested how companies could tackle the
paradox, through the deployment of ad hoc practices
to find the optimal balance and reap the best gains
from the collaboration (Bogers, 2011; Di Minin
and Faems, 2013; Laursen and Salter, 2014). One
above all, the proactive management of IP rights has
attracted the interest of scholars and practitioners. In
this new perspective, IP rights are deemed to increase
the effectiveness of R&D collaborations, enabling
safer exchange, through the reduction of opportunis-
tic behaviors (Bogers, 2012; Ritala and Hurmelinna-
Laukkanen, 2013; Hagedoorn and Zobel, 2015;
Henttonen et al., 2015; Leone, 2016).
This new way of looking at IP rights as
knowledge- sharing facilitators, rather than legal
tools for exclusion, represents the underlying ratio-
nale of the design and adoption of patent pledges,13
which have recently taken hold in the innovation
scene (Contreras and Jacob, 2017; Maggiolino and
Montagnani, 2017; Contreras, 2018; Chesbrough,
2020; Kim, 2020). They can be defined as ‘a pub-
licly announced intervention by patent owning enti-
ties (“pledgers”) to out- license active patents to the
restricted or unrestricted public free from or bound
to certain conditions for a reasonable or no monetary
compensation using standardized written or social
contracts’ (Ehrnsperger and Tietze, 2019a, p. 6).
Besides technology- standard setting dynamics and
patent asserting behavior to avoid authorities’ unfa-
vorable treatments, these voluntary private tools have
also served other objectives such as open- source
software development, green technologies and bio-
sciences diffusion, and even the collective and phil-
anthropic promotion of the common good (Contreras
and Jacob, 2017; Contreras, 2018). An illustrative
case is the Eco- Patent Commons,14 made by big
businesses ‘to prove their green credentials by shar-
ing environmentally friendly innovations with their
competitors […] for mutual and wider social benefit’
(WIPO15; Contreras, 2018; Contreras et al., 2019).
From an OI perspective, hence, patent pledges make
the promise to be effective means for diffusing tech-
nology and promoting innovation, through sharing
(Chien, 2015; Ehrnsperger and Tietze, 2019b).
With the unfolding of the pandemic, a high num-
ber of OI initiatives have emerged globally, to ‘pre-
vent duplication, reduce redundancy, and create
synergies based upon specialization and labor divi-
sion’ (Younes et al., 2020, p. 5), hence, proving the
strategic role of openness also – or even especially –
in the case of emergency (Chesbrough, 2020; Tietze
et al., 2020a, 2020b; Younes et al., 2020). However,
in this scenario, the ‘paradox of wanting to collabo-
rate but also safeguard one’s own interest’16 (Ratten,
2020, p. 5) has been exacerbated given the time con-
straints and the multitude of actors involved. Facing
these new IP- related challenges, some authors have
offered a multi- stakeholders framework to allow for
more timely IP considerations (IP ownership, rele-
vance, technological coverage, etc.), during a pan-
demic, to avoid obstacles in mobilizing resources
needed for the development and mass manufacturing
of Crisis- Critical Products (Moerchel et al., 2020a,
2020b; Ratten, 2020; Tiezte et al., 2020a, p. 1;

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
4 R&D Management 2021
2020b). Others have analyzed the voluntary pledges17
to make IP broadly available, suggesting that they
can overcome the hurdles faced by more elaborate
legal arrangements such as patent pools and be more
widely accepted than governmental compulsory
licensing (Contreras et al., 2020). However, the same
‘lightweight, self- executing and sometimes broad
nature of pledges could, without ongoing steward-
ship and active assessment of the rights being made
available, challenge users seeking to find specific
pledged IP’ (Contreras et al., 2020, p. 1148). In fact,
evidence on the Eco- Patent Common showed that
only making available and listing these IPs was not
enough to put the pledge to work as potential users
needed contextual information and accessible under-
standing to find applications of the pledged patents
(Contreras et al., 2019). Hence, making sense of the
huge amount of IP knowledge to allow the potential
user to ‘learn what IP are available’18 is paramount to
ensure that these large- scale collective pledges have
an impact on the follow- on innovation process, based
on the dissemination or use of pledged technologies,
for the achievement of the societal goal of recovering
from the crisis.
3. Research design
3.1. Case selection and description
The OCP initiative was launched in April 2020 with a
call ‘on organizations around the world to make their
patents and copyrights freely available in the fight
against the COVID- 19 pandemic’.19 In few months,
the OCP has attracted an incredible number of com-
panies, well known for their international reach and
mostly for their intense patenting activity, and hence
with the capacity to lead the way for other high- tech
leaders to join this effort.20 As a result, it has started
a global movement involving an increasing number
of complementary initiatives all around the globe
(Chesbrough, 2020; Contreras et al., 2020; Tietze et
al., 2020a, 2020b; McGahan et al., 2021). The ‘open-
ness’ of the OCP builds upon four main pillars: first,
the pledge is open to all types of organizations who
want to contribute to the fighting against COVID- 19;
second, it addresses the unrestricted public, interested
to apply the available IP, but ‘solely for the purpose
of diagnosing, preventing, containing, and treat-
ing COVID- 19’21; third, the participation scheme
encompasses two types of commitment, either as
pledgor or supporter. Only in the former case, there
is a legal commitment to make the pledge and allow
the free use of a portion of internal IP; and fourth,
besides some possible personalization,22 the basic
conditions of the pledge claim a ‘non- exclusive, roy-
alty free, worldwide, fully paid- up license (without
the right to sublicense)’ to the potential user.23
As a preliminary analysis, we classify pledgors
companies according to their size and type of com-
mitment. We collected data on revenues24 from Orbis
and Nexis Uni,25 and we enucleated firms’ statements
of participation as taken from their press releases.
We identified 11 main categories, ranging from more
general statements to more specific ones (related to
practice) (Figure1). First, the picture shows an even
distribution in terms of size, albeit many founding
adopters26 are clustered on the left side of the chart
representing very large companies. Regarding the
type of commitment, most of the companies are clus-
tered in the upper side of the figure, therefore being
in line with the general intent of allowing free access
to their portfolio relevant to fight COVID- 19. This
is especially true for the founding adopters, except
for Microsoft that has communicated a specific focus
on tracking technologies and IBM that focuses on
Figure 1. Pledgors type/size and commitment. Source: Authors’ Elaboration (2021).

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 5
medical patents; but it also applies to well- known
pledgors that have joined later, like AT&T, Uber and
Seagate. Different considerations can be brought for-
ward if we look at the lower section of the figure,
where we can detect a more specific type of com-
mitment, both in terms of fields (medical, hardware
and software) and in terms of applications (tracing,
ventilator, toolkit, etc.).
As a second preliminary analysis, we described
the 22 pledged patents showcased on the OCP web-
site.27 We collected the available patent cards and
complemented the information with the main pat-
ent statistics28 (IPC29 technological classes, claims,
backward and forward citations) drawn from Google
Patents30 and Espacenet.31 The table in Appendix A
shows that the selected patents belong to four funding
adopters (Facebook, Intel, IBM and Sandia National
Laboratories) and five additional pledgors (AT&T,
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, the New Jersey
Institute of Technology, Uber and Fujitsu).32 Most of
these patents represent very novel pieces of knowl-
edge (five of them were granted between 2019 and
2020 and six are still pending), and they mostly refer
to the G06- Computing; Calculating or Counting33
(seven patents) and H04- Electric Communication
Technique (five patents) IPC classes. Besides,
many of them report about 20 claims but show, as
expected, a minimum number of forward citations
(with some notable exceptions of Intel’s pending pat-
ent – US20200128006A1 – with 54 citations). On the
contrary, most of the patents display an average of
25 citations (with a peak of 133 for AT&T’s patent,
US7298836B2). This means that, albeit they were
filed very recently, those patents do not represent
novel knowledge in absolute terms, as they tap into a
well- established state of the art, as also demonstrated
by the scarce presence of non- patent/scientific liter-
ature (except for Sandia’s patent – US8163154B1 –
with 22 references).
4. Research method
In this study, modern Innovation Management meth-
ods are used, according to the recent calls of top
journals, to contribute to methodological diversity
(Tseng et al., 2007; Choi et al., 2013; Ghazinoory et
al., 2013; Lee et al., 2014; Han and Sohn, 2015; Arts
et al., 2017; Moehrle et al., 2017; Antons et al., 2020;
Faems, 2020; Ritala et al., 2020). More specifically,
this study implements semantic methods to leverage
the hidden potential of unstructured data to unveil
original and novel data insights (Faems, 2020; Ritala
et al., 2020). For what concerns the unstructured
data related to patents, we applied IP Analytics, with
specific references to text mining approaches and
semantic methods (Aristodemou & Tietze, 2017,
2018).
The overall research method is represented in
Figure2.
4.1. Data collection
We collected data from multiple sources, at different
levels (World Wide Web, pledgors companies and
pledged patents), to build a comprehensive knowl-
edge base to analyze the OCP initiative. In the first
step, the automatic crawling system explored 1974
websites to extract and read their content. The same
parsing process has been applied to extract textual
contents from press releases and patent title and
abstracts. Full details of the data collection sources
are embodied in Appendix B.
4.2. Data analysis
We cleaned the information, by lowercasing the text,
eliminating punctuation, useless and unrelated words
and spelling mistakes; we processed the cleaned
data concatenating the title and abstract words. We
applied a proprietary semantic tool, named ‘TAG’,
to analyze the information. It first splits all the sen-
tences into periods, eliminates words that are not
Figure 2. The overall research process. Source: Authors’
Elaboration (2021).

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
6 R&D Management 2021
significant for semantic interpretation (i.e. adverbs),
simplifies the meaning of sentences and tokenizes
them into significant words (TAG1). It, hence, selects
the most relevant items for the following step, as fol-
lows: (1) by combining up to three adjacent signifi-
cant words (input items); (2) by cross- referencing the
input items with the AI- generated Database34; (3) by
ranking the topics corresponding to the input items,
according to their relevance35; and (4) by keeping
only the relevant topics and the corresponding input
items (TAG2). It finally correlates all the relevant
input items (hereinafter simply item/words) with one
another, based on the number of their links.36 All the
correlations are therefore ranked for their relevance
(TAG3).
4.3. Result visualization
We opted to use flow charts that enable us to rep-
resent the main links without considering the data
with minor relevance. Starting from the main words
with the greatest number of inbound links, we can
easily visualize the links between them and related
items.
5. Results and discussion
5.1. OCP Manifesto overview
In the first study, we investigated how the Web res-
onated with the OCP initiative by semantically ana-
lyzing all the relevant information on the web (1974
sites). The visual representation is shown in Figure3.
The scanning of the World Wide Web has brought
to the surface, as expected, the main word ‘Covid’
and the top linked words, such as ‘news’, ‘impact’,
‘response’, ‘crisis’ and ‘fight’, all in line with the
OCP Manifesto (see also Appendix C for the list
of the top 20 main words37). Very counterintuitive,
instead, it is the relevance of the word ‘market’ (with
1382 inbound links) that appears to be less in line
with the aim of the initiative; however, it may fore-
see some potential trajectories for solutions develop-
ment. This intuition might explain the evidence of
the additional association between the word ‘market’
with ‘electronic automation’ and ‘electronic design’,
both referring to possible fields of application of
the pledged technologies. As we were interested to
know the association between ‘covid’ and ‘patents’,
we displayed the corresponding relation, which
Figure 3. Open COVID Pledge Manifesto overview. Notes: The graph starts with the most relevant word in terms of inbound links from
other words, and it shows the relation with the top linked words/couples of words in terms of outbound links. The number in brackets
indicates the number of inbound links. Exceptionally, the graph includes the relation with the word ‘patents’ (which ranked very low with
only 424 links) only because it is considered relevant for our interpretation. Source: Authors’ Elaboration (2021).

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 7
happened to be very weak, with only 424 links, albeit
the same word is ranked 9th in the list of the top 20
main words, (as detailed in Appendix C). As a final
remark, the visualization also reveals the names of
many pledgors involved, such as Microsoft, Amazon,
Seagate, Morgan Stanley, which therefore seem to
act as driving forces of the initiative great resonance.
5.2. Open COVID Pledge pledgors
overview
In the second study, we investigated how pledgors
companies communicated their participation in the
OCP initiative, through the semantic analysis of
the contents of their official web pages and related
press releases. This analysis is meant to complement
the descriptive overview that we presented in para-
graph3. The findings are depicted in Figure4.
As for Figure3, the main word is again ‘covid’
(with 2,947 inbound links) and its top linked words
are ‘open’, ‘pandemic’, ‘open covid’, ‘free’, ‘help’,
‘access’ and ‘fight’ and ‘property’ and ‘intellectual’,
which resemble the broader ‘types of commitment’
of the pledgor organizations. This is also visible in
the remaining displayed relations, which emphasize
the same word/couple of words. The semantic analy-
sis, therefore, suggests that, besides some exceptions
not semantically relevant, the main message commu-
nicated by the companies conforms pretty much with
the OCP’s general Manifesto.
5.3. Open COVID Pledge patents overview
In the third study, we pursued the semantic analysis
of all the available documents regarding pledged pat-
ents. We argue that this further step can enhance the
overall understanding of the pledgors’ commitment,
which is only synthesized in their official communi-
cation channels. Therefore, we applied the semantic
method to the available OCP patent cards, displayed
on the website in the ‘Featured IP’ section.38 The
results are shown in Figure5.
In sum, the flow chart suggests that the showcased
patent documents semantically relate to the words
‘demand’ and ‘information’ with the words ‘man-
agement’, ‘real time’, ‘system’, ‘supply’, ‘provid-
ers’, ‘services’ and ‘request’ and ‘contextual’, ‘post’,
‘healthcare’, ‘access’, ‘systems’ and ‘network’,
respectively. Moreover, the relevance of these words
is also evident in the remaining set of portrayed
relations, with some specifications, such as ‘data’,
‘authentication’, ‘essential’, ‘social’, ‘resources’
and ‘devices’. Overall, these findings enrich the
descriptive analysis of featured patents exhibiting
the prevalence of the classes H04 and G06 and seem
to suggest that available technologies mainly refer
to the real- time search and analysis of contextual
information.
As the previous analysis was only based on a lim-
ited number of patent cards, we tried to enlarge our
potential pool of patent knowledge, and we retrieved
additional documents related to the OCP’s patents
through the AI- based search tool (IP Screener),39
available upon registration. Through the ‘AutoMatch
Technology’, this tool returns the top 25 patents
semantically associated with either the research ideas
proposed (first criterion) or the patents of interest
(second criterion). We applied the latter criterion, by
using the titles and abstracts of the featured patents,
and we extracted all the available information on the
related patents.40 By applying the semantic method
to this new set of patent documents and cross-
referencing the previous findings, we were able to
depict Figure6.
Compared with Figure5, we found, as expected,
that the range of domains and application is substan-
tially wider. Together with general words such as
‘systems’, ‘data’, ‘information’, which recall the pre-
vious findings, the semantic analysis enucleates a full
range of new relations with the most relevant words
like ‘device’, ‘detection’ and ‘method’, which corre-
spond to a higher intensity of blue cells (about 88.9%,
which means eight out of nine pledgors’ showcased
patents display this word in the documents). Right
after, we found words like ‘medical’ (66.7%), ‘net-
work’ (66.7%), ‘input’ (66.7%), ‘detect’ (55.6%),
‘method’ (55.6%), ‘identify’ (55.6%) and ‘display’
(55.6%), which all suggest technologies related to
devices for the detection, display and monitoring of
the virus diffusion. In addition, the figure shows the
percentage of overlap between the OCP featured pat-
ents – belonging to the nine pledgors displayed in
the figure – and all the top- 25 related patents. It is
interesting to note that the range varies substantially
among pledgors, with upper (71.1% of Mitsubishi
Electric Research Lab) and lower bound (7.9% of
NJIT).
6. Conclusion
We provide a semantic analysis of the available
information on the OCP, encompassing the general
overview of its Manifesto, the analysis of the pled-
gor companies and the investigation of their fea-
tured and related pledged patents. We proved the
great resonance of the initiative, which has started
an international movement of complementary efforts

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
8 R&D Management 2021
all around the globe; we also emphasized the nature
of participation of the founding adopters and addi-
tional pledgors, all very well- known companies
with international reach and mostly with highly
intense patenting activity. We enriched this analysis
by deep diving into the content nature of the show-
cased patents and integrating these findings with the
additional evidence on the related patents resulted
from the employment of the AI- based search tool (IP
Screener) available online. Overall, the findings sug-
gest that the covered technologies refer to the real-
time demand and search of contextual information
and to the devices for virus detection. We, therefore,
provide an enhanced understanding of the nature of
the OCP in the direction marked by previous studies
towards the need to provide contextual information,
‘ongoing stewardship and active assessment of the
rights being made available’ (Contreras et al., 2020,
p. 1,148).
Despite this contribution, the inherent research
design of the paper poses some relevant questions
about the representative nature of our results. While
the first two studies do not suffer from potential
selection bias as we have collected all the available
information related to the initiative at the broader
level and the company level; the third study is driven,
also in the case of the integration of the top 25 related
patents, by the availability of information on the
limited pool of pledged patents, whose cards were
showcased in the official webpage of the OCP. As
the available patent portfolios, sometimes encom-
pass even thousands of patents,41 we are fully aware
of the under- estimation that we might have made.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that our evi-
dence is perfectly in line with the declared ‘access
rule’ limited solely to ‘the purpose of diagnosing, pre-
venting, containing and treating COVID- 19’. Hence,
it seems that the featured IPs represent exemplary
cases for potential users to learn what kind of IPs
were mostly available. Another issue, which might
undermine the representativeness of this study, is due
to the great novelty of this OCP initiative – which is
still undergoing and therefore attracting new partners
and new IPs. Indeed, our results must be considered
partial because they refer to the period ranging from
April to August 2020. The evidence is also limited
because it only refers to patents, while featured
IP also encompasses other types of rights, such as
copyright, that we did not include in the analysis.
Besides potential bias and partiality of our findings,
we should also consider that while patents are official
documents, widely available and accessible (Choi
etal., 2013), press releases and websites are drafted
by the company press office for different purposes
and are freely accessible to a wide audience (e.g.
suppliers, customer and even competitors); hence, it
is less likely that they contain competition- sensitive
information. The edulcorated material available may
represent a potential limitation of the analysis, in
terms of the level of in- depth investigation that we
Figure 4. Open COVID Pledge pledgors overview. Notes: The graph starts with the most relevant word in terms of inbound links from
other words, and it shows the relation with the top linked words/couples of words in terms of outbound links, which emerged from the
semantic analysis. The number in brackets indicates the number of inbound links. Source: Authors’ Elaboration (2021).

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 9
Figure 5. Open COVID Pledge featured patents. Notes: The graph starts with the most relevant word in terms of inbound links from other
words, and it shows the relation with the top linked words/couples of words in terms of outbound links, which emerged from the semantic
analysis. The number in brackets indicates the number of inbound links. Source: Authors’ Elaboration (2021).
Figure 6. Open COVID Pledge showcased and related patents. Notes: Similarly, to Figures3– 5, the graph lists the most relevant word in
terms of inbound links, and it shows the relation with the top linked words/couples of words in terms of outbound links, which emerged
from the semantic analysis. Among the most relevant words, we listed only the top 38 that can be also found in the available document
ofOCP showcased patents. Hence, the intersection between the main words and the name of the company is colored in blue anytime
thesame word is also present in the available document of OCP showcased patents of that specific company, otherwise is left white.
Source: Authors’ Elaboration (2021).

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
10 R&D Management 2021
could have eventually achieved. In fact, the second
study based on press release and official websites of
the pledgors companies was not so informative as it
showed a high degree of isomorphism across organi-
zations. Nevertheless, albeit limited in depth, the data
available can be considered truthful, given the fact
that companies with a high reputation, such as the
OCP pledgors, are increasingly encouraged to ensure
veracity and accountability in web- reported infor-
mation. In addition, social scientists have recently
proved the methodological relevance of web scraping
and its robustness (Youtie et al., 2012; Arora etal.,
2013; Gök et al., 2015). For instance, Gök et al.
(2015) find that website data offer advantages in
‘coverage, currency, accessibility, quantity and flexi-
bility’ (Gök et al., 2015, p. 668). Thus, we are confi-
dent that the combination of the data, the three levels
of the study and the semantic method used overall
allowed us to offer a comprehensive and real picture
of the portrayed phenomenon.
For future research, we identified some potential
trajectories that are worth pursuing given their impact
at the single and collective level. From a company
perspective, it might be interesting to understand the
exact perimeter of the pledged IP portfolio, and even-
tually, the drivers for the selection of the IP included
in the pledge. Do companies select the most or the
less valuable IP to pledge? Do companies pledge the
entire portfolio or do they select the IP most relevant
for the achievement of the pledge aim? If the pledge
encompasses only related patents, the decision burden
is shifted to the participating company and, therefore,
the search cost of the potential user is downsized, and
this could eventually stimulate the use of the featured
IP. However, this circumstance may limit the range of
potential solutions that can be developed as the knowl-
edge base available is much narrower. Same consider-
ations apply if we consider the potential value of IP,
which may not necessarily lead to valuable solutions
depending on the type of users and scenario. From
a collective perspective, all these questions address
the relevant need to assess whether the pledge has
an impact on follow- on innovations, especially in the
case of ‘mission- oriented’ pledges, which are set to
achieve social and philanthropic goals, such as in the
pandemic. Moreover, answering these questions is
also important to seize the impact of regular pledges,
in comparison with other IP practices, such as patent
pools and compulsory licensing.
Acknowledgements
This research has benefitted from the technical sup-
port of the innovative startup InstantTechnologies
(https://insta ntech nolog ies.com/), which has pro-
vided resources and tools to tackle the methodolog-
ical challenges of this paper. We specifically thank
Alessandro Paolini, Chairman and co- CEO of the
company, and Marco de Biagi for copious and useful
insights on data handling and analysis.
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Notes
1 Navigating opportunities for innovation and entrepre-
neurship under COVID- 19, available at https://cmr.
berke ley.edu/2020/06/innov ation - entre prene urshi p/,
last accessed on July 2020.
2 The COVID- 19 Open Research Dataset, aimed at
publishing all of the known medical literatures on the
coronavirus in a machine- readable format, has been
generated through the collaboration of different part-
ners, such as Semantic Scholar, the Allen Institute for
AI and leading research groups. It is a free resource
made available for the global research community, con-
taining more than 280,000 scholarly articles on coro-
navirus. The dataset is available at https://www.seman
ticsc holar.org/cord19, last accessed on July 2020.
3 For a more comprehensive review, see Tiezte et al.
(2020a, pp. 4– 5).
4 Medtronic Shares Ventilation Design Specifications
to Accelerate Efforts to Increase Global Ventilator
Production, available at http://newsr oom.medtr onic.
com/news- relea ses/news- relea se- detai ls/medtr onic-
share s- venti latio n- desig n- speci ficat ions- accel erate/,
last accessed on July 2020.
5 Emergency mask for hospital ventilators, available at
https://www.isinn ova.it/easy- covid 19/, last accessed on
August 2020.
6 Open COVID Pledge, available at https://openc ovidp
ledge.org/, last accessed on July 2020.
7 The full list of Complementary efforts is also available
at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/compl ement ary- effor ts/,
last accessed March 2021.
8 The World Health Organization launched a voluntary
COVID- 19 product pool. What happens next? Available
at https://www.statn ews.com/pharm alot/2020/05/29/who-
covid 19- coron aviru s- paten ts/, last accessed on August
2020.
9 Open COVID- 19 Declaration, available at https://www.
gckyo to.com/covid - 2, last accessed on August 2020.
10 Putting pledged IP to work – identifying IP available
under the Open COVID Pledge, available at https://
openc ovidp ledge.org/2020/06/12/putti ng- pledg ed- ip-
to- work- ident ifyin g- ip- avail able- under - the- open- covid
- pledg e/, last accessed in March 2021.
11 ‘This special issue aims to capture the evolving prac-
tice of such COVID- 19 stimulated innovative efforts,
to crystallize some of the lessons about the innovation
approaches taken in the effort to prevent, mitigate and
ultimately overcome the crisis. Through bringing to-
gether the reflections of the innovation community,
firstly we strive to disseminate this emerging best prac-
tice actions to aid current and future efforts in the fight
against COVID- 19 and secondly, to understand how
practice of these innovations may reshape the theories
and approaches that our field has relied on over the
last 50 years’. (R&D Management Special Issue call
on ‘Providing solutions in emergencies: R&D and in-
novation management during COVID- 19’), available at
https://onlin elibr ary.wiley.com/pb- asset s/asset s/14679
310/RADM%20Cov id- 19%20Spe cial%20Iss ue%20
CFP - 15869 46806 503.pdf, last accessed in March 2021.
12 ‘The Open COVID movement goes global’, available
at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/2020/05/21/the- open-
covid - movem ent- goes- globa l/, last accessed in March
2021; ‘Internationalizing the Open COVID Pledge:
Translations and Outreach’, available at https://openc
ovidp ledge.org/2020/10/15/inter natio naliz ing- the-
open- covid - pledg e- trans latio ns- and- outre ach/, last
acce ssed in March 2021.
13 The literature on the topic of pledges involves different
types of pledges, besides patents’ one, such as share and
stock pledges, especially in relation to organizations’
innovative capabilities (Pang and Wang, 2020; Wang
etal., 2020) and firm value (Li et al., 2019).
14 The initiative started in 2008 and failed in 2016 because
of governance and organizational issues. However, it

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 13
involved 13 participant companies that pledged 238
‘green technology’ patents (Contreras, 2018).
15 Bowman (2009) ‘The Eco- Patent Commons: caring
through sharing’, available at https://www.wipo.int/
wipo_magaz ine/en/2009/03/artic le_0004.html, last ac-
cessed on March 2021.
16 In this sense, we can interpret the resistance opposed
by pharmaceutical leaders, and by some governments,
such as the United States, to the voluntary patent pool
on COVID- 19 products, promoted by the World Health
Organization. Likewise, we can read the competition
that emerged between different countries in the race for
the new vaccine, leading to a real antagonism amongst
governments for the acquisition and development of
solutions crucial in the fight against COVID- 19.
17 For a comprehensive review of patent pledges, see
http://www.pijip.org/non- sdo- paten t- commi tment s/,
last accessed in March 2021.
18 See footnote 11.
19 OCP Manifesto, available at https://openc ovidp ledge.
org/about/, latest accessed in March 2021.
20 ‘Patent holders urged to take “Open COVID Pledge”
for quicker end to pandemic’, available at https://
openc ovidp ledge.org/2020/04/07/paten t- holde rs- urged
- to- take- open- covid - pledg e- for- quick er- end- to- pande
mic- 2/, last accessed on March 2021; ‘Top patent hold-
ers make Open COVID Pledge’, available at https://openc
ovidp ledge.org/2020/05/25/top- paten t- holde rs- make-
open- covid - pledg e/, last accessed in March 2021.
21 OCL- P v1., available at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/
licen ses__trash ed/v1- 1- ocl- p/, last accessed on August
2020.
22 The three options are namely Open COVID Standard
Licenses (standard), Open COVID Compatible
Licenses; and Open COVID Alternative Licenses. More
information available at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/
licen ses/.
23 OCL- P v1., available at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/
licen ses__trash ed/v1- 1- ocl- p/, last accessed on August
2020.
24 Collected data referred either to year 2019 or to year
2020, which is the latest available record on ORBIS or
Nexis Uni dataset. For Unified Patents, Sandia National
Laboratories, Nasa JPL, OVSI and Semantic Scholar,
no information on revenues was found (n.a.).
25 Orbis (comparable data resource on private companies),
available at https://newor bis.bvdin fo.com/; Nexis Uni
(dynamic research tool connecting you to comprehen-
sive content for accurate, targeted searches), available at
http://www.nexis uni.com. In particular, most data have
been extracted from Nexis Uni relying mainly on Zoom
Company Information.
26 Founding adopters are pledgors that have joined the cause in
April 2020; the additional pledgors have married the cause
in a later stage. As of the 20th of August 2020 – our cut- off
point – there were 29 listed on OCP Official website.
27 Showcased patents, also called Featured IP, are available
at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/partn er- ip/, last accessed
on August 2020. For our research, the showcased pat-
ent cards taken into account were those displayed until
the 20th of August with a specific link to a well- defined
patent (generic referrals to pledged technologies were
excluded).
28 According to patent literature (e.g. Reitzig, 2004),
patents’ claims allow us to understand which are the
specific elements of a patent that are legally protected
(providing a measure of the scope of protection);
through backward citations, we can comprehend how
much these patents rely on prior art (offering a measure
of radicalness); and with forward citations, it is evident
how much that protected technology has been impact-
ful in terms of stimulating the production of subsequent
related knowledge. Indeed, they suggest a measure of
value and importance of the patent (Amore et al., 2013).
To conclude, technological classes allow us to under-
stand the application area of the protected knowledge.
29 International Patent Classification (IPC), available at
https://www.wipo.int/class ifica tions/ ipc/en/, last ac-
cessed on September 2020. We reported the IPC of 19
out of 22 showcased patents. Indeed, three IPC concern-
ing two open- source Sandia’s projects and one NJIT’s
patent, focused on 3D printing, which is still pending,
were not available.
30 Google Patents, available at https://paten ts.google.
com/, last accessed on September 2020.
31 Espacenet, available at https://world wide.espac enet.
com/, last accessed on September 2020.
32 These numbers are referred to the available information
until the 20th of August.
33 An explanatory case of the most represented classes
(G06) is the ‘Gesture- based signature authentication
systems’ held by Intel that allows reducing contacts
during the daily activities that require personal valida-
tion, reducing the spread of the virus. Another remark-
able case is the ‘method of estimating location of nodes
in wireless networks’, classified in H04 and held by
Mitsubishi Electric, that allows implementing an effec-
tive contact tracing system to avoid virus diffusion.
34 The TAG runs based on an AI- engine trained by patent/
covid/tech and innovation- related readings/documents.
The AI- generated database encompasses items, topics
and corresponding correlation weight (+9/−9) between
items and topics.
35 The relevance of the topics is assessed by summing up
all the corresponding weights.
36 The TAG also measures the distance between all the
items in the text, by counting the words separating
thetwo items and attributing a ‘distance value’ anytime
the sentence is interrupted by a full stop.
37 For the sake of clarity, we select only the top linked
words, but the overall knowledge base analyzed is avail-
able upon requests. Moreover, we provide the list of the
top 20 main words with their top linked words, to allow a

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
14 R&D Management 2021
more comprehensive view of the findings of the seman-
tic analysis. These tables, available for FiguresC1– C3,
included in Appendix C, should be read as companion
documents for a complete understanding.
38 Those cards are created ad hoc for the initiative and
translate the content of the patent documents into more
friendly- to- use information, allowing for a more effec-
tive search of interested IP from outsiders. Full infor-
mation is accessible at https://openc ovidp ledge.org/
partn er- ip/. For our research, the patent cards taken into
account were those displayed until the 20th of August
with a specific link to a well- defined patent (generic re-
ferrals to pledged technologies were excluded).
39 Search Open COVID Pledged IP, available at https://
openc ovidp ledge.org/ip/, last accessed on September
2020.
40 Our analysis dates back to the 20th of August 2020, in
line with other data extraction activities.
41 ‘Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM,
Microsoft and Sandia National Laboratories join “Open
COVID Pledge” to make patents freely available in the
fight against COVID- 19’, available at https://openc
ovidp ledge.org/2020/04/20/amazo n- faceb ook- hewle
tt- packa rd- enter prise - ibm- micro soft- and- sandi a- natio
nal- labor atori es- join- open- covid - pledg e- to- make- paten
ts- freel y- avail able- in- the- fight - again st- covid - 19- 2/, last
accessed in March 2021.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli is a PhD student and
Research Assistant at Luiss University. Her research
interests lie in Innovation Management and, specif-
ically, in the intersection between Open Innovation
behaviors and new Intellectual Property practices.
Maria Isabella Leone is Associate Professor of
Innovation Management and Faculty Member of the
PhD Program in Management at Luiss University.
She acts also as the Academic Coordinator of
the MBA programs, the Director of the Open
Innovation and Intellectual Property Master and the
Director of the Executive Flex Course in Venture
Capital Dynamics and Startup Engagement at Luiss
Business School. She is also a Certified Innovation
Manager by the Ministry of Economic Development.
She is one of the PhD Supervisors of the Early- stage
researchers recruited within the ‘EINST4INE-
European Training Network for Industry Digital
Transformation across Innovation Ecosystems’
Project, funded under the EU Fund Horizon 2020,
and she also co- leads two tasks on inno- preneurial
spaces, start- ups and business development, within
the ENGAGE.EU consortium, selected as one of
the 2020 European Universities Alliances, funded
under the Erasmus Plus and Horizon 2020 Program.
In 2008, she obtained a PhD in Management from
the University of Bologna. Her research focuses
on Open Innovation practices, including (patent/
trademark) licensing strategies, and on the interplay
between Open Innovation and Intellectual Property
rights.
Riccardo Ricci is Partner and CTO of
InstanTechnologies and Head of AI. He is a pioneer
in the semantic and artificial intelligence field. For
25years, he has been developing software and algo-
rithms in these areas.

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 15
APPENDIX A
Showcased OCP patents statistics
APPENDIX B
Data source details

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
16 R&D Management 2021
APPENDIX C
Top 20 main words
Figure C1

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open COVID Pledge Patents to fight against COVID- 19
R&D Management 2021 17
Figure C2

© 2021 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone and Riccardo Ricci
18 R&D Management 2021
Figure C3