Help us understand how your business is harnessing digital technology to transform and survive

Over the past years, start-ups have faced financial crises, physical catastrophes and pandemics. Yet despite these turbulent environments, entrepreneurs are still exploiting new business and market opportunities and developing emergent strategies to survive and grow their businesses. Now, research conducted by the University of Kent is giving entrepreneurs and business owners the opportunity to help others learn from their use of digital technologies to survive these turbulent environments.

Dr Maria Balta and Professor Thanos Papadopoulos from Kent Business School have received funding from the British Academy of Management to explore the role of digital technologies in helping these start-ups transform and achieve sustainability, and are seeking volunteers to help them do so. They are looking for entrepreneurs and business owners to  take part in a 30-60 minute Microsoft Teams interview about how their business responded to the crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The interview will seek to find out about the new opportunities and entrepreneurial activities which arose for you during the pandemic, and the role technology played in helping- you enact them to survive and grow as a business.

You contribution will help the project achieve its aims to:

  • Understand the business model technology pivot entrepreneurs use to exploit and explore resources to seize new opportunities
  • Understand the process by which technology pivoting takes place and is enacted
  • Provide a roadmap for technology pivoting in start-ups that can be used in practice by entrepreneurs who would like their ventures to grow and prosper.

Dr Maria Balta’s research is located at the nexus of human resource management and strategy. Through her work, she is exploring new forms of organising through the use of technology, related to Health and Well-being in SMEs. Professor Thanos Papadopoulos’ expertise is in operations and information management. Together, they recently co-authored research on the use of digital technologies by small and medium enterprises during Covid-19, which has since been included in the World Health Organisation’s list of Covid-19 research.

Through this new project, funded by the BAM Transitions 2 Research scheme, Maria and Thanos hope to continue their positive impact by shedding light on technology pivoting in industry to inform entrepreneurs, policymakers and practitioners with ‘lessons learned’ and practical guidelines for entrepreneurs on how to survive and prosper through the use of digital technology in turbulent environments.

If you are an entrepreneur or business owner running a business which is engaging with some form of digital technology and would like to contribute to this study, we would like to hear from you by 28 April 2023. Please email Maria at m.balta@kent.ac.uk with your name and a short summary of your business to express an interest in taking part.