Entrepreneurial Digital Resilience in War: Lessons from Ukrainian SMEs

Abstract

Limited IS research is available on how SMEs achieve digital resilience in the context of major geopolitical shocks. Other than large organizations, SMEs typically lack the resources to quickly produce capabilities to resist and recover. At the same time, entrepreneurial bricolage teaches us that such organizations are used to improvisation with resources-at-hand. We turn to a study of Ukrainian entrepreneurs during the ongoing war through the lens of bricolage for the creation of digital resilience. Our interviews with Ukrainian SME founders reveal that entrepreneurs actively repurpose and recombine existing digital tools, infrastructures, and platforms to maintain operations, ensure remote work, and reconfigure business models. Our study contributes to the digital resilience literature by highlighting how resilience emerges through cumulative learning, cognitive framing, and entrepreneurial improvisation, offering new insights into managing SMEs under extreme conditions.