Turning crises into opportunities in the service sector: how to build antifragility in small and medium service enterprises

Abstract

PurposeThis work aims at investigating the variables that foster antifragility in the context of small and medium-sized service companies (service SMEs).Design/methodology/approachThis work adopts an exploratory approach in order to deepen five examples of service SMEs that were able to change their own business models and to reinforce their strategic position while facing the COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsThe ingredients of antifragility ability include: entrepreneurial orientation, context insightfulness and operational dexterity. This article singles out the resources and capacities backing the blossoming of antifragility abilities in service SMEs. Slack financial resources, many and diverse research-and-innovation partners, operational dexterity, fastness and creativity are included among such resources and capabilities.Practical implicationsCrises may occur frequently in many ways; thus, this work provides some guidance geared to services SMEs in order to increase their level of preparedness for future crises and to nurture their ability to transform them into opportunities.Originality/valueDespite many concepts associated with antifragility have been dealt with in literature such as resilience or agility, antifragility is hitherto underexplored. This article is among the first ones to explore factors fostering antifragility in service SMEs.

Under external pressure: action pathways when an adverse event forces micro-enterprises to change

“…Notwithstanding this growing knowledge on success strategies, ways to effectively prepare for adverse events and different determinant factors for successful/unsuccessful organizational responses (Corvello et al, 2022;Eggers and Francis Park, 2018), there is still limited theory on how organizations respond to adverse events. As most of the scholarly focus so far has been on response outcomes that either bring businesses to the pre-adversity state or, in some cases, even help with growing it further, we still know very little about how organizations respond to adverse events and especially among micro-enterprises where the organizational actions to a large extent are decided and executed by individual entrepreneurs.…”

“…Second, whereas prior research has paid close attention to actionable success strategies for dealing with adversities (Bundy et al, 2017;Manolova et al, 2020) and ways to effectively prepare to use these strategies in the face of adversity (Battisti et al, 2019;Corvello et al, 2022), the model developed in this study illustrates a broad range of different actions, irrespective of their eventual outcome for businesses. By focusing on what entrepreneurs actually do when faced with an adverse event-and not prescriptions for what they should do-we enrich existing theory on entrepreneurs, their actions and different processes that precede the choice of actions.…”

“…, 2018), economic and social downturns (Smallbone et al. , 2012) and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic (Corvello et al. , 2022; Kuckertz et al.…”

Guest editorial: The 24th excellence in services international conference – EISIC conference

“…The contributions grouped in this cluster investigate the role that digitalization plays in (1) boosting learning activities for human capital development (Barile et al ., 2023), (2) improving the digital service quality process (Brunetti et al ., 2023), (3) detecting user satisfaction (Magno and Dossena, 2023), (4) service quality practices (Schiavone et al ., 2023), (5) increasing quality assurance of automated hand hygiene monitoring service through the ISO certifications (Ortiz and Karapetrovic, 2023) and (6) fostering antifragility in the context of small and medium-sized service companies (service SMEs) (Corvello et al ., 2023).…”

“…Corvello et al . (2023) investigated the variables that foster antifragility, by analyzing service SMEs.…”