While much has been written about resilience in the supply chain management (SCM) literature, most investigations focus on large corporations from the perspective of helping them bounce back after disruptions. There has been little investigation on resilience among the weakest and smallest members of the global supply chain-that is, small entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). This is despite the fact that these micro-entrepreneurs are often key cogs in the last-mile supply chain efforts of major multinational corporations. They experience disruptions at a higher rate than major corporations, have fewer formal mechanisms in place to recover from them, and are often unable to "bounce back" in the traditional sense. In the current study, we address this gap by investigating multiple types of disruptions (i.e., idiosyncratic and covariate) and how they impact entrepreneurial resilience among microbusinesses in an emerging economy.In addition, we look at the buffering impact of various actors (i.e., financial and social) on entrepreneurship in the face of these disruptions. We highlight the important role that these entrepreneurs play in the BOP supply chain and provide suggestions that can assist with improving their resilience and the resilience of the BOP supply chain.

Supply chain managers have yet to solve the conundrum of profitably distributing and selling to the poorest consumers. Most prevailing methods of addressing this problem take one of two contrasting approaches—that is, (1) price subsidization or (2) benefits/cash transfers. The former has been heavily studied in the literature with the consensus being that it is highly inefficient and prone to leaks. We investigate the viability of the latter by focusing on how branching out to reach the poorest customers impacts the performance of banks. Results indicate that the impacts of this approach are deleterious, thereby questioning its commercial scalability. Therefore, we argue that this approach may also have only limited potential in terms of being an effective, large‐scale solution to the problem of access for the poor. Instead, a third approach to achieve scalable Bottom of the Pyramid growth and development needs to be considered—cultivating partnerships through joint distribution.

Purpose Financial inclusion remains one of the most promising avenues to bring about development for the poorest segments of society. A substantial body of work has looked into financial inclusion, especially in terms of microfinance, but much of it has been anecdotal and case-based. There is little scholarship that broadly investigates how microfinance-funded businesses choose to use the loans, especially given the ever-present competition for resources that such businesses face regarding which investment priority to pursue. In addition, the efficacy of these investments in terms of subsequent profitability remains unexplored, and so too does the influence of the entrepreneur’s embeddedness in the local community. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This study reports the results from a field investigation of 927 women entrepreneurs who received a microfinance loan from a leading Indian microfinance institution. Logit and OLS regression models are employed in a moderation analysis by way of hierarchical regression. Findings Results indicate that access to microfinance increases the likelihood that the enterprise invests in marketing infrastructure and operational scale. In addition, structural embeddedness has a weakening effect on this relationship for operational scale while having a strengthening effect on the relationship for marketing infrastructure. Finally, operational scale is related to enterprise profitability, while marketing infrastructure is not. These findings suggest that embeddedness in the community is associated with the entrepreneur making sub-optimal choices regarding microfinance utilization. Originality/value To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the simultaneous marketing and operational impacts of microfinance access. It is also the first study to relate these measures to the profitability of the enterprise, especially in the context of structural embeddedness in the network.

No abstract

No abstract