Caballero-Morales Santiago-Omar
Universidad Popular Autonoma del Estado de Puebla, A.C., Postgraduate Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Puebla, Mexico.
Res Int Bus Finance. 2021 Oct;57:101396. doi: 10.1016/j.ribaf.2021.101396. Epub 2021 Feb 4.
The quarantine and disruption of non-essential activities as measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected all economies around the World. This has had a deeper impact on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies because they have very limited resources and vulnerable supply chain and business-to-business/business-to-clients relationships. In this context, it is expected that after the pandemic many of these enterprises will disappear as the "new normality" will require changes in business and infrastructure management. To reduce this risk, innovation is identified as a key aspect of business recovery in the ongoing and post-COVID-19 pandemic period. This work presents a multidisciplinary methodological approach to guide these enterprises to innovate their products for new markets and making a better use of their limited available resources. As an example of this approach, the research-supported development of a new product for a family-owned SME was performed in a zone with high COVID-19 risk. The results provide insight regarding innovation as a survival tool for SMEs during and after the COVID-19 contingency, and the use of digital resources is identified as the main facilitator for networking and research-based design of innovative products within the "social distance" context.
作为遏制新冠疫情的措施，非必要活动的隔离和中断对全球所有经济体都产生了负面影响。这对新兴经济体中的中小企业影响更深，因为它们资源非常有限，供应链脆弱，企业对企业/企业对客户的关系也很脆弱。在这种情况下，预计疫情过后，许多此类企业将会消失，因为“新常态”将要求企业在业务和基础设施管理方面做出改变。为降低这种风险，创新被视为当前及新冠疫情后企业复苏的一个关键因素。这项工作提出了一种多学科方法，以指导这些企业为新市场创新其产品，并更好地利用其有限的可用资源。作为该方法的一个例子，在一个新冠疫情高风险地区，为一家家族式中小企业开展了一项由研究支持的新产品开发工作。研究结果为创新如何成为中小企业在新冠疫情期间及之后的生存工具提供了见解，并且数字资源的使用被确定为在“社交距离”背景下进行创新产品的网络连接和基于研究的设计的主要促进因素。
