Being resilient for society: evidence from companies that leveraged their resources and capabilities to fight the COVID‐19 crisis

Abstract

This study adopts a resilience perspective to explain how companies managed to contribute innovative solutions to fight the COVID‐19 crisis. We studied how five companies operating in different industries (three in automotive, one in printing, and one in rubber and plastic products manufacturing) managed to reorganize activities and employ their R&D and innovation capabilities to enhance their resilience. Simultaneously, they increased the health system’s capacity to cope with the outbreak. Through a qualitative inductive study, based on interviews with company managers, we found that the firms mobilized their resources and capabilities to expand their ability to adapt and cope with adversity at the organizational level. In addition, moved by the sensitivity to the extreme context and a perceived sense of urgency, the firms deployed the same endowments to strengthen the community’s response to a crisis. Our study shows that an organization can directly and positively foster the broader social system’s resilience. This study contributes to the innovation literature by identifying innovation capabilities as fundamental antecedents of resilience building for organizational response, paving the way for strengthening the link between resilience and innovation.

R&D management at a time of crisis: what are we learning from the initial response to the COVID‐19 pandemic?

“…This shift towards a 'purposeled' logic (Ferrigno and Cucino, 2021) was universal across the sample, in both large (e.g. Bergami et al, 2021;von Behr et al, 2021) and small (Battaglia et al, 2021;Clauss et al, 2021) companies. Even very large 'arch-competitor' companies such as Apple and Google joined forces in the name of a societal value logic: developing the standard for bluetooth technology that enabled contact tracing across the world (Marhold, 2021).…”

“…Some companies could be agile to deal with the crisis, leveraging the capability to 'effectuate', to reshuffle their competence, looking for complementary ones, to enact new business models and creating new ecosystems (Radziwon et al, 2021), sometimes even temporarily (Clauss et al, 2021). In sum, it is no surprise that dynamic capabilities are confirmed as antecedents of firms' resilience (Bergami et al, 2021;Soluk et al, 2021), but there was also evidence that governments demonstrated a high level of adaptation (Patrucco et al, 2021), as they revisited their innovation instrument programmes to encourage innovation and open innovation approaches in fighting the crisis.…”

Toward a Business Resilience Model: The Case of Sharia Property in Surabaya Raya Area during COVID-19 Pandemic

“…During the interview, author recorded and transcribed expost interviews to capture every bit of information [23] and obtained approximately 39 transcript pages. To enhance the understanding of the cases and triangulate data from interviews, author relied on secondary data.…”

Industry 4.0 and production recovery in the covid era

“…From the perspective of firms, this phase is based on a reconfiguration of the production activities of some firms to fill the shortage of health and personal protective equipment. Examples include automakers (i.e., Tesla, Ford, GM, and Ferrari; Bergami et al, 2021 ) and aerospace companies that transformed their operations in favor of manufacturing health ventilator components ( Morse, 2020 ) and face-shields ( McConnell, 2020 ). Other examples of manufacturing conversion include the production of sanitizing gels by firms in the wine and spirits industry (e.g., Pernod Ricard, Abboud et al, 2020 ) and plastic bottles for sanitizers by large perfume manufacturers (e.g., LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE).…”