Grants, innovativeness, and management styles – secret weapons of small firms’ resilience?

Commissioned by: The Institute of Economics, Zagreb 
Project duration: February 1, 2022 – January 31, 2023
Project manager: Bruno Škrinjarić
Collaborators: Sonja Radas, Valerija Botrić

Summary: 
In this project, we studied firms’ resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic times. To adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, firms needed to have dynamic capabilities, one of which is innovation capability. This project had three main goals: (1) investigate the role of innovative capability in creating firm resilience; (2) investigate whether the two genders had different strategic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and chose different paths to resilience; (3) investigate whether the two genders have different ways to innovate in the crisis. We limited our study to the population of knowledge-intensive high-tech services, and high- and medium high-tech manufacturing firms. This study utilized three datasets: (1) primary data obtained from a questionnaire; (2) financial data on the population of Croatian enterprises from the Croatian Financial Agency (FINA); and (3) data on firms’ gender ownership structure from the Croatian Court Register. Based on the questionnaire response rate and availability of financial data, we chose between methodologies including different matching techniques and regression methodologies. Generating insight into the proposed research questions contributed to the body of literature since the extent of published work is small for each of them.
 

RESEARCH AREA: Sectors and enterprises