Entrepreneurship

Strategy

Innovation

Business Model Innovation as a tool for SMEs in the Food and Beverage Industry to successfully navigate crises such as COVID-19

The purpose of this project is to shed light on how SMEs can use temporary business model innovations to navigate and recover from crises. 

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Start & End Date

15/06/2021 - 15/12/2021

Main Applicant

Cruz, M., EHL Hospitality Business School

Partner

Enzo Bivona, University of Palermo (Italy)

External Funding

HES-SO

Project Description

This project explores how small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in the food and beverage industry (F&B) use business model innovations (BMIs) to navigate and recover from crises such as COVID-19. Building on an in-depth multi-case study of four SME breweries in Switzerland, this project aims at developing a generalizable framework to help SMEs in the F&B industry to understand how to create BMIs to coping and recovering from crises.

Scientific Output

Bivona, E., & Cruz, M. (2021). Can business model innovation help SMEs in the food and beverage industry to respond to crises? Findings from a Swiss brewery during COVID-19. British food journal, 123(11), 3638-3660.

Cruz, M. and Bivona, E. (Forthcoming). Unlocking potential: collaborative approaches to crisis management and business model innovation for SMEs. European Journal of Innovation Management.

EHL Blog

SMEs: Business Dynamics in the Food and Beverage Industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has made apparent managers need to better understand the dynamics driving performance in their company. With businesses repeatedly shut down, often for several months at a time, hospitality managers were pushed to reinvent themselves in a short period of time. Nonetheless, while this has been an imminent need for nearly everyone in the industry, this is particularly true for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in the food and beverage industry, where companies are especially vulnerable to changes in their external environment (Johnson et al., 2017).

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Our Team


Dr. Margarita Cruz

Associate Professor - EHL Hospitality Business School

Margarita Cruz holds a PhD in Economics and is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at EHL. Her research explores the intersection of organizational theory and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on how social evaluations influence entrepreneurial outcomes, such as founding new ventures and launching new products.
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