Entrepreneurial Action: Redefining the Sense and Building Resilience as Coping Strategies for SMEs and Traditional Enterprises Facing the New Digital and Crises Environment

Abstract

The new digital environment and the COVID-19 crisis, having drastically increased the amount of teleworking and e-commerce, seem to have benefited GAFAM and digital platforms. Under the current conditions, SMEs and traditional businesses are forced to look for adaptive strategies. Some researchers (e.g. A. Carmeli and G.D. Markman) argue that they SMEs and traditional businesses need to build entrepreneurial and organizational resilience . And it is in this respect, in particular, that psychology can be usefully mobilized to analyze new forms of economic competition. On these grounds, the authors of the paper defend the idea that the SMEs and traditional businesses will be able to exist and assert themselves against their new competitors. In this new interconnected, turbulent and uncertain environment, this self-assertion passes through a strategic and organizational reconfiguration, but also and above all, through entrepreneurial action in its effectual logic which can lead to resilience and, moreover, to antifragility .

Keywords

• digital environment
• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurial action
• effectuation logic
• communicative action
• resilience
• antifragility