Decoding China’s COVID 19 'Virus Exceptionalism': Community-based Digital Contact Tracing in Wuhan

International audienceThis article explores how key stakeholders of an open innovation ecosystem interact in the digital context to overcome a public health emergency. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, comprehensive, accurate and timely community-based digital contact tracing serves as a decisive measure in curbing viral transmission. This strategy integrates agile government decision-making, corporate innovation, community coordination, and citizen participation. In the process of big data analytics, communities play the crucial role of the middleground that moderates the interactions between organizational upperground (government and enterprises) and individual underground (citizens) on the digital platform. To demonstrate the application, we study the three stages of “closed-end community management” in Wuhan, which represents China’s “virus exceptionalism” amid the pandemic. Finally, we raise several ethical concerns related to this model for future R&D management research on digitization