The digitalization and public crisis responses of small and medium enterprises: Implications from a COVID-19 survey
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(2020) 14:19
Frontiers of Business Research in China
RESEARCH
Open Access
The digitalization and public crisis responses of small and medium enterprises: Implications from a COVID-19 survey Hai Guo1,2, Zhuen Yang1*, Ran Huang1 and Anqi Guo1 * Correspondence: rbsyangzhuen@ 163.com 1 Business School, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Abstract The COVID-19 outbreak is a global crisis that has placed small and medium enterprises (SMEs) under huge pressure to survive, requiring them to respond effectively to the crisis. SMEs have adopted various digital technologies to cope with this crisis. Using a data set from a survey with 518 Chinese SMEs, the study examines the relationship between SMEs’ digitalization and their public crisis responses. The empirical results show that digitalization has enabled SMEs to respond effectively to the public crisis by making use of their dynamic capabilities. In addition, digitalization can help improve SMEs’ performance. We propose a theoretical framework of digitalization and crisis responses for SMEs and present three avenues for future research. Keywords: COVID-19, Digitalization, Dynamic capabilities, Public crisis, Small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
Introduction At the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) broke out suddenly and spread rapidly to become a global pandemic. By late June 2020, COVID-19 had infected more than 8 million people worldwide, including more than 80,000 people in China. This public health crisis has posed great challenges for the survival and development of firms, with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suffering in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic has been economically destructive in many ways. First, as more and more governments block cities in order to control the pandemic, the global supply chain has been significantly disrupted as both imports and exports are blocked. Second, delays in the resumption of work have greatly reduced firms’ production capacity while fixed costs such as salary and rent remain unchanged, leading to serious cash flow issues. Third, the reduction in demand due to the outbreak has posed serious threats to service sectors such as catering, hospitality, and cultural tourism. Worse, the damage caused by the COVID-19 outbreak is expected to be longlasting and have a chilling effect on global economic growth. © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons lice
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