COVID-19 Crisis Control with Emphasis on Social Innovation Based on Public Participation

A crisis is an accident occurs suddenly as a result of natural and human events and actions and causes hardship and damage to a human community or society, and eliminating it requires emergency and extraordinary actions and operations and depends on identifying the crisis and raising awareness at the right time. In this context, the best and most effective way to attract social collaboration is through a new combination of different ideas and forms of cooperation and creating an entirely new approach to a social issue called social innovation. This study seeks to identify the dimensions of social innovation based on public participation in the event of the COVID-19 crisis. This research has practical objectives in which the grounded theory strategy has been used qualitatively. In this study, experts from the statistical community were selected from the Ministry of Health and Medical Education. Exploratory analysis method has also been used to identify the effective factors in social innovation. Based on the analysis of research data, the categories including: effectiveness of public participation, investment to attract participation, management ability, networking ability, general policymaking ability, necessary cultural and educational infrastructure, the existence of capable legal organizations to solve executive problems, facilitate Coordination, control, containment and mitigation of the effects of the crisis were identified as the eight main factors in social innovation based on the public participation and the government. The COVID-19 pandemic proved that government institutions and the structure of the health system in all countries were insufficient to respond to such a widespread crisis. The results of this study enable policymakers to have a model for social innovation in order to maintain and ensure the health of society, especially in times of crisis, by attracting public participation.