Entrepreneurial resilience and recovery during and after COVID-19 crisis: Firm- and community-level responses in China, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom

• Main Authors: Autio, Erkko, Nair, Rajesh, Habaradas, Raymund B., Shannon, Randall, Abe, Masato, Park, Donghyun, Jinjarak, Yothin, Yuan, Yuki, Idoko, Onyaglanu, Jimenez, Shieradel V., Mia, Ian Benedict R., Corpus, Jose Enrique Ruiz, Haider, Murtaza
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Organizational resilience; Entrepreneurship; COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- —Influence; Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/9550
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Entrepreneurial Resilience During and After the COVID-19 Crisis (EntREsilience) was launched in 2020 to identify effective entrepreneurial firm- and community-level responses and business model practices to support resilient adjustment to the economic adversity triggered by the global COVID-19 crisis. The project conducts longitudinal case studies exploring entrepreneurial resilience in five research sites: Wuhan, China; Bangkok, Thailand; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila, Philippines; and London, UK.Led by Imperial College Business School, London, and involving collaboration with De La Salle University (Philippines), Mahidol University College of Management (Thailand), Malaysian Global Innovation and Creation Centre MaGIC (Malaysia), Wuhan University (China), Asian Development Bank, and UN Economic and Social Council for Asea-Pacific ESCAP (Thailand), the objective of the project is to inform entrepreneurship policy and practice -- especially how governments can harness entrepreneurial resilience to Build Back Better.Entrepreneurial firms play a central role in facilitating economic resilience during times of economic crisis. Research shows that entrepreneurial firms hold on to their employees the longest when an economic crisis hits, and they are also the first to start re-hiring once the crisis starts to subside. So doing, entrepreneurial firms help both buffers against the economic shock and lead the eventual recovery -- and discover and innovate the post-crisis New Normal. Yet, surprisingly little is known about entrepreneurial resilience in general and even less about how entrepreneurs convert the crisis into a potential source of opportunity and how they experiment to discover the post-crisis New Normal. In this project we approach entrepreneurial resilience as a dynamic, opportunity-seeking process of proactive adjustment to the crisis conditions, one that helps convert the crisis into a ‘baptism of fire’, potentially enabling the entrepreneurial firm to emerge from the crisis stronger and help the economy to Build Back Better.