Turning a Crisis Into an Opportunity: Innovation During the Pandemic

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe repercussions from an economic and social point of view, having a detrimental effect for production, exports and supply chains for most industries. Within this context of unprecedented change, this chapter analyses the process of adjustment adopted by a vast array of industries in response to the pandemic. The recent COVID-19 crisis has radically revolutionized and transformed the business environment. This ranges from the way firms react to this suddenly needed transformation by shortcutting the way they provide their products and services (Lee and Trimi, 2021), how they can transform their supply chain infrastructures to adapt their products (Samson, 2020), and to how they enhance and extend their service and performance capacity according to disruptive market demands (Sharma et al., 2020). Overall, these developments have led firms in the industry to fundamentally change the ways they “do business”, in particular the ways they organize and conduct activities across the firm and the industry with customers, vendors, partners and other stakeholders. In this very dynamic context, it becomes an imperative for companies to reinvent themselves by often introducing innovative products or novel business models and by utilizing their existing resources and capabilities as well as combining them with new ones (George et al., 2020). For example, L’Oreal promptly pivoted to produce hand sanitizer in short supply and freely distributed it to hospitals, pharmacies, care homes, and food stores.

However, while the majority of the academic articles published so far on the COVID-19 crisis mostly focuses on either supply chain disruptions (Sharma et al., 2020; Samson, 2020), internal organizational disruptions (Carnevale and Hatak, 2020) or the impact of the crisis on customers (Hall et al., 2020), our work embraces a more holistic approach by focusing on a cross-national and cross-sectorial comparison of those innovation strategies that ultimately might as well yield to growth opportunities. In particular, since crises are defined largely by uncertainty, we couple approaches from grand challenges (George et al., 2016), the crisis management literature (Boersma et al., 2022) with organizational learning theory (Bundy et al., 2016; James et al., 2011) to gain a better understanding of how companies across countries and industry sectors respond to disruption by innovating, and the valuable lessons that can be drawn from this experience.