Resumen de Factors affecting SMEs business resilience during the first Covid-19 outbreak:: evidence from Italian yacht-building firms
Alessia Patuelli, Shahab Zare, Nicola Lattanzi
Purpose: The business resilience literature provides sev-eral factors that help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) deal with situations of grave uncertainty. Yacht-building firms are a niche of SMEs, which play a key role within the local ecosystem, composed of SMEs and artisans. This research aims to understand the drivers of yacht-building firms’ resilience when the Covid-19 pandemic started.Design/methodology/approach: Focusing on a selection of Italian firms, we adopted a qualitative strategy, analyz-ing the data with the Gioia method. Five dimensions drove yacht-building firms’ resilience: localized relationships, product attributes, organizational changes, internal capi-tal, and a positive can-do attitude.Findings: We present a unique finding: following the pan-demic, yachts are considered a safe place, which contributed to firms’ resilience. The paper offers several contributions to the literature and practical implications, answering a call for more empirical studies on the drivers of resilience among SMEs.
