ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the existential public health and economic fragilities of the civil aviation industry. To prevent future public health disruptions, the civil aviation industry is gaining interest in becoming more "resilient” but rarely elaborates on its meaning, hampering decision-making and strategy development. When looking into the academic literature it seems that a proliferation of resilience-related concepts occurred. Although enriching resilience, it also dilutes its meaning and reduces its use for practice. This paper aims to create concept clarity regarding resilience by proposing a categorization of resilience. Based upon a scoping review, this categorization dissects resilience into four reoccurring aspects: fragility, robustness, adaptation, and transformation. This categorization is expected to support sensemaking in disruptive times while assisting decision-making and strategy development on resilience. When applying this categorization in the civil aviation and public health context, the transformative aspect seems underused. Further research will focus on maturing the categorization of resilience and its use as a sensemaking tool.
ABSTRACT
During Covid-19, some innovative start-ups not only absorbed the shock but also improved afterwards through the development of capabilities related to antifragility. Drawing on the antifragility literature we have selected a set of internal capabilities that influence the survival of start-ups. Then, we applied qualitative benchmarking of the fuzzy-set to examine which interactions between the aforementioned internal capabilities affect the survival of innovative start-ups. We used a unique dataset of 37 innovative start-ups that survived in Italy after the Covid-19 lockdown. Our results suggest the interaction between some specific capabilities (creativity, flexibility and collaboration) are antecedents of antifragility. The interaction between these capabilities enables start-ups to survive during a crisis. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Contexts of uncertainty, such as the pandemic, cause exogenous shocks for different players in the global economic system. Some actors, however, react by turning crises into opportunities: a property called antifragility. This study has the goal to identify antecedents of antifragility in innovative start-ups. The paper presents the results of a survey conducted on Italian innovative start-ups during the Covid-19 crisis to investigate the links between the antifragile reaction and factors as intangible capital, availability of uncommitted tangible resources (or slack), technologies and absorptive capacity. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services while accelerating IoT (Internet of Things) deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial role of antifragility is to enable critical infrastructures to gain from disorder to foster their adaptability to real unexpected environmental changes. Thus, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the antifragility concept while clarifying the difference with the resilience concept. Moreover, it highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of critical infrastructures and unintentionally promoted the antifragility concept. To showcase the main concepts, we adopt the blockchain as an example of an antifragile system. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this conceptual paper is to understand if augmented intelligence may be considered a driver of antifragility that can be allegorically represented by the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which consists of the use of gold or silver to repair broken objects in ceramic to get a better aesthetic form. Covid-19, like a black swan, represented, for many companies, understood as systems, a complex situation capable of upsetting their equilibrium. It had thus forced them to accelerate the digitization process. Digitalization, based on artificial intelligence (AI) tools, brings in many fields new perspectives, such as new business scenarios and models. By using the Viable System Approach (vSa) lens, we investigated the impact of smart working, widely spread to manage a complex situation (Covid-19), in allowing companies to cope with changes and to be antifragile. A remote smart working model is proposed, as an evolution of smart working, based on a new culture of "doing business” to search for new viable conditions. It can allow companies a more efficient resources management, an endless orientation towards results, but also new synergies in new contexts thanks to new and increased networks, for new collaborations and new forms of interactions, as well as more profitable relationships with employees, based on a strong relationship of trust and on better opportunities for work-life balance. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
To survive the emergency caused by COVID-19, organisations need to change. In particular, many small firms will need to transform their business model. In some cases the crisis is an opportunity to move towards activities with greater added value. This attitude has been called antifragility. In this study three SMEs from southern Italy were investigated which, as a response to the current crisis, transformed their business and shifted their production to new products. The paper identifies the dynamic capabilities implemented by the three companies and the levers used to develop these capabilities. In particular research and innovation processes, implemented through collaboration with research institutions, have proved to be of great importance in building antifragility. The COVID-19 pandemic is an exceptional crisis but emergencies in general are not uncommon. The results of this study are useful for researchers interested in antifragility in innovative small businesses and their ability to survive.
ABSTRACT
Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services while accelerating IoT (Internet of Things) deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial role of antifragility is to enable critical infrastructures to gain from disorder to foster their adaptability to real unexpected environmental changes. Thus, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the antifragility concept while clarifying the difference with the resilience concept. Moreover, it highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of critical infrastructures and unintentionally promoted the antifragility concept. To showcase the main concepts, we adopt the blockchain as an example of an antifragile system.
ABSTRACT
The paper explores the impacts and the possible post-Covid policies and projects for fragile territories represented by the inner areas of our country. The essay is structured into four parts: return to the efforts of the project (considering the structural dimension of the projects, enabling the future, promoting redundancy and antifragility);focus on fragile territories (considering them as relevant elements);listening and learning from communities (pulling relevant biographies out of the communities, improving listening skills and territorial capacity);promote new economies that are well-established in places (patiently working to build contextual economies with social impact). © 2021 FrancoAngeli. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives during the last 18 months has been evident, as in the aviation sector. The level of uncertainty we all have to face, both at the personal and the managerial level is so high that traditional planning approaches have become useless. We are not in the position to understand or forecast how the future will evolve, because the number of variables is high and the interactions somehow unknown. Under these circumstances, we need to evaluate our business options under alternative 'futures' with different strategies to be implemented. This paper describes the approach undertaken by Aeroporto G. Marconi di Bologna to 'fight business uncertainty', applying a Scenario Planning approach, in the darkest hours of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Airport Management is the property of Henry Stewart Publications LLP and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
The invariable governmental approach to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to effect the White Knight stance of Don Quixote, defending the population from the "Virus Dragon" and dedicating its knight-errantry to the damsel Dulcinea. Though essential, new therapeutics, vaccines, physical distancing, rigorous hygiene standards and efficient health systems are not sufficient to counter the effects of the virus. Individual compliance to public health guidelines also matters, while remaining similarly insufficient to diminish the threat. Earthier, citizen-led, community participation strategies, however, lead to innovative, tailored solutions that better fulfil the needs of diverse neighbourhoods and assures greater virus resistance and increase in population health compared to a top-down, knightly approach or isolated individual efforts. The challenge of COVID-19 offers communities a moment to build more resilient, antifragile communities that not only survive the current crisis, but that thrive after it, and that are better equipped for the next challenge. This is not the time for the singular heroics of the White Knight, or the antics of Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. It is the time of Sancho Panza, which is to say of regular non-credentialed citizens, and their collective efforts, who up to now have largely been considered pawns in this contest. Asset-based community development (ABCD) rejects both the individual as an island and the institutional, knightly emphasis on assessing needs and deficits within communities. It favours identifying and mobilising available and latent assets within a community to forge closer connections among all people, the better to collectivise problem-solving efforts. Community-driven initiatives are assisted in this by localised not-for-profit agencies that practice subsidiarity.