The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected countless businesses, leading to serious disruptions for many industries. Drawing on the resilience literature, this study offers an understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative industries and their response to the challenges they have encountered. This study reviews 59 papers following the systematic literature review approach and reveals several positive implications of the COVID-19 pandemic within the creative industries (e.g., IT and software) as well as the negative (the music industry, festivals, cultural events). Identifying six themes related to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative industries, we develop a response matrix based on the discussion of firms’ digital capabilities and their ability to adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. We outline future research directions using a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) framework.

PurposeInstitutional trust is vital for social and economic activity and crucial in reducing uncertainty for entrepreneurs and society. To shed light on the role of institutional trust on productive entrepreneurial activity, this paper analyses the impact of six urban entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) using the contexts of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. This study aims to pursue the research question: what role does institutional trust play in the relationship between formal institutions and productive entrepreneurship in the EEs of transition economies? This paper aims to posit that the development and enforcement of formal institutions and institutional trust enhance productive entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the authors apply a mixed-method approach. The authors’ dataset includes 657 respondents (ecosystem stakeholders) from six city-level entrepreneurial ecosystems in the transition economies of Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, as well as 51 semi-structured interviews from EE representative stakeholders to examine the validity of the findings.FindingsInstitutional trust in many cities has been negatively affected by institutionalised corruption and continuous non-transparent reforms, furthering prior research in developing and transition economies. The authors’ findings suggest that institutional trust can be investigated not as a country phenomenon but as a regional phenomenon extending prior research towards understanding the institutional trust – productive entrepreneurship research domain at the city EE level.Originality/valueThe authors apply the institutional trust perspective to the EEs in cities in order to examine how institutional trust affects productive entrepreneurship in challenging institutional environments. The authors contribute to the literature on institutions and entrepreneurship by using a mixed-method analysis to examine the relationship between formal institutions and institutional trust in the context of EEs in transition economies.

Entrepreneurship is a productive force of innovation and economic development. However, in post-conflict regions, there is a greater challenge in allocating entrepreneurial talent to productive entrepreneurship. In this study, we examine the entrepreneurship ecosystem, which is built on the “bottom-up” principles to understand whether its pillars can facilitate productive entrepreneurship in two Ukrainian regions shaken by multiple revolutions and regime change. We introduce a model that puts entrepreneurial conditions in cities and formal institutional changes to a competitive test. Building on the regional entrepreneurship literature, we perform an empirical study in a developing country to reveal what drives productive entrepreneurship in post-conflict regions with entrepreneurship culture, formal networks, debt and equity financing emerging as important determinants of productive entrepreneurship. The effect of formal institutions is significant but highly correlated with rent-seeking behavior of government and corruption. Our analysis suggests that the entrepreneurial conditions in regions focusing on the bottom-up processes of supporting entrepreneurship should work better to enhance productive entrepreneurship activity in a post-conflict region.

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