How to Achieve Swift Resilience: the Role of Digital Innovation Enabled Mindfulness

Abstract

Contributed to by the prevalence of digital technology, various cases of new ventures achieve resilience quickly despite experiencing hardship. Growing attention has been devoted to mindfulness—being alert and acting swiftly—to explain recovery. Scholars have primarily focused on mindful resource preparation pre-crisis. Nevertheless, how to mindfully organize resources as a crisis occurs remains under-explored. Based on an inductive study of a ride-sharing vehicle venture, which rapidly became an open service platform during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, we develop a framework termed “swift resilience” to understand how new ventures mindfully organize resources, driven by digital innovation. In particular, we critically trace three mechanisms—“data-driven stretching,” “collective sharing,” and “rapid pivoting”—and develop a process model to understand how new ventures build swift resilience. Our emerging findings shed light on the scholarship of organizational resilience, mindfulness, and digital entrepreneurship, and provide guidance to managers on achieving resilience quickly.