Opportunities from adversity: The enabling impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for the actions of Finnish and Californian food and beverage ventures

Abstract

Crises act as critical episodes for entrepreneurs, bringing about unexpected changes and heightened uncertainty. Yet crises can also have an enabling impact, creating new opportunities. This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic enabled new opportunities for 30 Finnish and 34 Californian food and beverage ventures. We demonstrate how the pandemic enabled the ventures’ crisis responses through various different types of mechanisms in various pairings and with different logics of enablement. Our findings suggest that the crisis profile and entrepreneurial action interact to shape the impact of the crisis and the ability of ventures to leverage its enabling effect. The enabler mechanisms can result straightforwardly from changes not only in resources and demand, but also in a more complex manner due to the ideological shifts arising from crises. Also, the mechanisms pair with each other to enable ventures’ actions, either working concurrently or consecutively. Oftentimes, the creative manner in which the ventures leverage these pairings resembles bricolage. Better awareness of how the crisis-induced enabler mechanisms operate and interact can lead to more effective and resilient crisis responses.