Strategic Adaption (Capabilities) and the Responsiveness to COVID-19’s Business Environmental Threats

Christoffer Hansson () and Bruno F. Abrantes ()
Additional contact information
Christoffer Hansson: Niels Brock Copenhagen Business College (NBCBC)
Bruno F. Abrantes: Niels Brock Copenhagen Business College (NBCBC)

A chapter in Essentials on Dynamic Capabilities for a Contemporary World, 2023, pp 1-23 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In 2020, the world faced one of the most unpredictable events in recent history, that is, the COVID-19 outbreak. This chapter instrumentalizes this phenomenon, aiming to understand how contemporary organizations strategize in order to prepare and accommodate unpredictable external business environment (EBE) events such as the COVID-19 pandemic or other/s alike. A theoretical revision within Strategic Management theory delves into the subfields of Strategic Adaptability, Strategic Agility, Strategic Flexibility, and Strategic Innovation. With a holistic multi-case study approach, one uses semi-structured interviews with Scandinavian organizations within the software industry to grasp the organizational responsive-initiatives to the EBE constraints and its impact on their performance during and on a post-pandemic period. Through a thematic analysis, the interviews followed an axial coding model to find overarching patterns (sense-making) from the original data outcomes. The results demonstrated that organizations are far from an optimal point of timely responsiveness. However, those who built adaption capabilities by experience (or exposure) were the ones that were immersed in the problem and developed the necessary heuristics, thus, a strategic adaptation process. Those firms hold in common a renewed bundle of capabilities and a subsequent enhanced market response with higher strategic fitness than other organizations.

Keywords: Strategic adaptability; Strategic agility; Strategic flexibility; Strategic innovation; COVID-19; External environment; Unexpected market change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:seschp:978-3-031-34814-3_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031348143

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-34814-3_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies on Entrepreneurship, Structural Change and Industrial Dynamics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().