Surviving the COVID-19-Accelerated Digital Transformation: The Case of Portuguese SME and the Role of YBS Project

Abstract

COVID-19 brought a lot of disruption into the business world. To cope with the challenges, companies tried to adopt new work formats, embracing the digital transformation as a possible solution to survive. Together with this change, owners and workers had to adapt and in several circumstances, learning new competencies and developing new capabilities. As this is a recent alteration, it is not complete yet, the effects of the pandemic crisis in businesses and people. Additionally, there are some initiatives to help entrepreneurs to start their own business or deal / improve their actual one. As such, this study intends to contribute to characterize the situation in Portugal and understand the role of one of these initiatives—the YBS—your business success—project. A small number of interviews were carried out with some companies in order to understand how they have faced the COVID-19 challenge. Results show that people responded to the challenge, and for some of them, these are even better than before. As this is just an exploratory study, more research about these changes and the process of innovation is needed as future work.