CONFERENCE THEME AND CONTEXT
The COVID-19 pandemic and the many lockdowns in economies worldwide create a unique situation with no documented equivalent in the entrepreneurship literature (Kraus et al., 2020). Nevertheless, a body of research on entrepreneurship and crisis management (e.g., Cowling et al., 2012; Williams and Vorley, 2015) offers two research streams in particular that could be informative about the COVID-19 pandemic. The first one deals with how start-ups respond to a crisis and refer specifically to the concept of resilience (Williams et al., 2017). The second research stream deals with policies and factors that might facilitate and/or hinder a startup's survival during a crisis (e.g., Runyan, 2006).
It is fundamental to analyze what happened in the post-pandemic, pushing researchers to develop novel theories and approaches for a more resilient future.