Negative Spillovers Across Partnerships for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

Abstract Humanity faces ongoing and contemporaneous grand challenges Occasionally, abrupt shocks escalate a grand challenge's salience over others Prior research has advocated forming partnerships to address grand challenges via responsible innovation Yet, it remains unclear how temporal changes in the salience of a grand challenge impact innovation performances of partnerships We address this research gap by bridging the literature on issue salience, responsible innovation and interorganizational relationships We argue that shocks either aid or harm the performance of partnerships for responsible innovation depending on whether their domains are directly or indirectly affected The Ebola outbreak in 2014 sets the empirical context to test our theory We find that while the innovation performance of Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak rose eleven-fold, the performance of partnerships treating Influenza fell by 84 9 percent Our theory and findings have immediate implications for today's COVID-19 outbreak, cautioning against salience shifts among concurrent grand challenges