The Impact of COVID-19 on Sustainable Business Models in SMEs

Abstract

Businesses have been exposed to various challenges during the global pandemic, and their response to this disruption has impacted their resilience as well as their chances to overcome this crisis. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are changing their business models in order to adapt to this changing environment. Service-based industries have been hit particularly hard. This research investigates how SMEs operating in service industries have been coping with the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to gain insights into which transformation drivers they have focused on and which technologies they have selected as a means to respond to the disruption. These insights regarding SMEs are then explored according to their influence on the redefinition of sustainable business models in SMEs. The review data was analyzed via a customized research framework that contains three dimensions and 30 subconcepts. The results show the distribution of drivers and technologies across service sectors. They are organized into a Business Model Canvas and could be considered useful for academia and practitioners. The highly unpredictable environment allows for only a few feasible strategic approaches regarding an SME’s decision on to follow incumbents, to become a challenger, or to reinvent themselves based on their own transformation drivers and readiness to apply digital technologies.

Sustainable Production Management Model for Small and Medium Enterprises in Some South-Central EU Countries

“…It also changed the entrepreneurship and management system in general [51]. Different authors were investigating the possibilities of creating business models in different production and service sectors by exploring transformation drivers for changes in organization, technology or finances [24]. Some of them saw the pandemic crisis as a major opportunity for SMEs to change their business and production model, to invest in research and development more than usual [52].…”

“…The rate of business failures among SMEs could be doubled, as some estimations show [23]. Therefore, small and medium enterprises have to respond to the challenges that the pandemic created on the market and modify their business models [24][25][26][27].…”

Intelligent Backpropagation Networks with Bayesian Regularization for Mathematical Models of Environmental Economic Systems

“…The existing studies available for analyzing the dynamics of EESs are based on numerical and analytical procedures of deterministic nature, while the stochastic or probabilistic procedure based on the exploitation of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies is relatively less implemented for the analysis of the EESs, as represented in Equations ( 1)- (3). Probabilistic methodologies via AI algorithms have been implemented exhaustively for a variety of linear/nonlinear systems arising in a spectrum of applications in social, economic, environment, physical, and engineering disciplines [13][14][15][16][17]. A few illustrations of paramount interest include ecological studies [18], acoustics [19], physics [20][21][22][23][24], bioinformatics [25][26][27][28][29][30][31], fluid dynamics [32][33][34][35], financial mathematics [36,37], and energy [38].…”

The Importance of Resilience and Flexibility of Entrepreneur Characters for Coping with a Crisis Situation. A Systematic Literature Review During Covid-19

“…The negative consequences of the pandemic have been found in all aspects of the social, psychological, political, and economic spheres. Apart from the disruptions identified with the Covid-19 pandemic, various new opportunities have been experienced in the market with new ideas and methods to stay resilient in the market as well as leading to a reversible repercussion to manage the crisis that is being faced by the world (Gregurec, Tomičić Furjan & Tomičić-Pupek, 2021).…”