Surviving the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Role of Digital Innovation and Transformation

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic, by effecting businesses, is inciting inter-and intra-organizational challenges requiring firms to adopt and/or adapt approaches that facilitate in managing business operations. Confronting such epidemic and its related challenges is importantly based on efficient internal and external collaboration. Interorganizational trust is also becoming fragile particularly in uncertain situations such as current pandemic. Therefore, firms are struggling to even survive as their whole supply chain has erupted and lacking trust on external partners. In such circumstances, digital transformation is preparing organizations to address these issues and can support them to provide the opportunities to cope up and bounce back. This means that digital innovation and transformation seem to be playing a crucial role in recovering from the effect of Covid-19. Therefore, this paper taps on the topical issue of the varying impact of Covid-19 on internal and external operations of firms and how digital innovation and transformation play a critical role keep-up with 'new normal' routines.

Understanding crisis resilience in manufacturing firms in the DACH region during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…, 2021). The technology that was most useful with building elasticity supported remote working and collaboration in the firm and with customers; this finding is supported by Shahzad and Imran (2021).…”

“…Each of the individual stages is then discussed and compared with the literature. The actions are then abstracted based on the model of people, processes, and technologies (Erol et al ., 2010) because of the findings and the literature (Fathy El Dessouky and Al-Ghareeb, 2020; Shahzad and Imran, 2021; Laberge et al. , 2020) stating the importance of digital technology in terms of integrating resources in a highly dynamic crisis environment.…”

“…The trade-offs needed to build the new capacity in the company through elasticity were best achieved through trusting relationships with customers, suppliers and management (Belhadi et al, 2021). The technology that was most useful with building elasticity supported remote working and collaboration in the firm and with customers; this finding is supported by Shahzad and Imran (2021).…”

“…The ability of firms to deal with change in this form is closely related to the resilience that a firm exhibits to rapidly transform from the status quo to a “new normal” state and adapt to new emerging digital technologies (Shahzad and Imran, 2021; Laberge et al. , 2020).…”

“…The ability of firms to deal with change in this form is closely related to the resilience that a firm exhibits to rapidly transform from the status quo to a "new normal" state and adapt to new emerging digital technologies (Shahzad and Imran, 2021;Laberge et al, 2020). During the COVID-19 period, Rapaccini et al (2020) described the changes that occurred to manufacturing firms in Italy in terms of their resilience.…”