How Technology-Based Businesses are Reducing Their Vulnerability During the Natural Disasters?

This article investigates how technological businesses can resiliently exploit opportunities through their business capacity to reduce their vulnerability. We analyzed qualitative data derived from the real experiences of 19 technological firms that were involved in epidemic crises such as COVID-19. Using a qualitative approach, this article introduces a new framework comprising three fields: vulnerability, resilience, and opportunity. This paper first examines what factors lead to the vulnerability of businesses in epidemic crises such as COVID-19. Four levels of vulnerability (Individual, business, national, and international) were identified. Then, by focusing on the business resilience capacity and creating a link with the three perspectives of opportunity (allocative, discovery, and creative), it proposes strategies to reduce vulnerability. To reduce vulnerability, technological businesses are moving along a continuum from optimal resource allocation to opportunity creation based on their business capacities. In this spectrum, enablers and inhibitors are the factors that mediate the speed of their movement toward resilience and stability. This research links three perspectives of opportunity with business resilience during the epidemic crises and shows that technological businesses can reduce their vulnerability through absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity, and exploit opportunities accordingly. Since vulnerability assessment is a critical element in the field of disaster risk reduction and sustainability, this study contributes to the literature on sustainability and disasters.

How Technology-Based Businesses are Reducing Their Vulnerability During the Natural Disasters? Keywords:

business resilience , Business adaptive capacity , Business Vulnerability , Business absorptive capacity , Business transformative capacity , Opportunity