Fast Expert Teams vs. COVID-19: How to help Finland avoid paralyzing when experts cannot meet F2F?

Fast Expert Teams-initiative combines volunteer expertise to collaborate effectively across professional and organizational borders from universities, private and public organizations and ministries. Experts use digital tools and collaboration platforms to solve various complex problems that companies, ministries and other organisations are struggling currently.
Diverse expertise is matched for each complex task so that teams can tackle various problems quickly. The initiative was launched a week ago in March 16th and is growing fast consisting currently of 60 experts working pro bono from different universities and research organizations (LUT University, Tampere University, Aalto, VTT, Jyväskylä University, Finnish Institute for Occupational Health, and University of Eastern Finland), ministries (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment; Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Transport and Communications), private firms (Gofore, Humap, Solved, Skillhive, Howspace), and public sector organizations such as Sitra Lab, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters as well as cities and regions, e.g. Regional Council of Häme. The initiative is led by Professor Kirsimarja Blomqvist from LUT University.

We provide fast expertise across professional and organizational borders to complex problems. Traditional inter-organizational collaboration is slow in crisis situation and due to COVID-19 experts cannot communicate face-to-face.

Researchers from universities and research organizations (LUT University, Tampere University, Aalto, VTT, Jyväskylä University, Finnish Institute for Occupational Health, and University of Eastern Finland), ministries (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment; Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Transport and Communications), private firms (Gofore, Humap, Solved, Skillhive, Howspace), and public sector organizations such as Sitra Lab, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters as well as cities and regions, e.g. Regional Council of Häme

We are collecting real-time data, launching temporary expert teams to solve complex problems quickly, collecting data for later research use, as well as building and managing the collaboration model for the expert network and fast expert teams for complex problems (all in parallel). The initiative is launched pro bono on top of other duties so resources are scarce and we have to move fast due to crisis. We are collecting data also on our operations to to be able to model the expert network and fast expert team practices for more general use after the crisis.