Being resilient for society: evidence from companies that leveraged their resources and capabilities to fight the COVID‐19 crisis
本研究通过五家不同行业公司的案例，揭示企业如何调动资源和创新能力，在增强自身韧性的同时提升医疗系统应对疫情的能力，并直接促进社会系统的韧性。
This study adopts a resilience perspective to explain how companies managed to contribute innovative solutions to fight the COVID‐19 crisis. We studied how five companies operating in different industries (three in automotive, one in printing, and one in rubber and plastic products manufacturing) managed to reorganize activities and employ their R&D and innovation capabilities to enhance their resilience. Simultaneously, they increased the health system’s capacity to cope with the outbreak. Through a qualitative inductive study, based on interviews with company managers, we found that the firms mobilized their resources and capabilities to expand their ability to adapt and cope with adversity at the organizational level. In addition, moved by the sensitivity to the extreme context and a perceived sense of urgency, the firms deployed the same endowments to strengthen the community’s response to a crisis. Our study shows that an organization can directly and positively foster the broader social system’s resilience. This study contributes to the innovation literature by identifying innovation capabilities as fundamental antecedents of resilience building for organizational response, paving the way for strengthening the link between resilience and innovation.