Family firms’ agility during pandemic crisis

The very early stage of entrepreneurship takes place when an individual identifies a business opportunity based on his/her knowledge/ experience. One’s risk-taking attitude might enable him/her to create a venture.

Two different theories explain how a person identifies a business opportunity. While opportunity discovery theory emphasizes the exogenous shocks that create a market disequilibrium, opportunity creation theory advocates for the creative destructions manipulated by the entrepreneurs to shift the market equilibrium.

Some factors push entrepreneurs to follow a different path to identify opportunities. Family entrepreneurs are shown to be affected by the exogenous shocks more than “trial and error” activities to identify business opportunities. Therefore, it is not far to anticipate them engaging in economic activities during an economic crisis such as COVID-19 Pandemic. In fact, reports have been describing how family entrepreneurs participated in creating value during the recent crisis. Yet, it is still soon to assess if the non-incumbent family firms are proactively discovering business opportunities during this period or not.