The Phoenix Effect – Rising from crisis through digital collaboration – How crisis affects social enterprises’ digitalization for value co-creation?

Abstract

Crisis and market turbulence can cause changes in digitalization and value co-creation of social enterprises. This paper aims to identify how crisis and market turbulence affect the way social enterprises employ digitalization to enable value co-creation. To achieve this, the authors conduct Retrospective Case Studies by interviewing ten social entrepreneurs from developing countries and synthesizing their findings from primary and secondary data. Their findings reveal that social enterprises that use digital collaboration can be more resilient in the face of crises. Simultaneously, crisis affects how social enterprises use digitalization for collaboration through new phenomena which they call Crisis-Resilient Digital Ecosystem, Transformative Resilience Network, and Synergistic Economic Resilience. Finally, the authors propose the Interconnected Resilience Framework to illustrate the relationship between market turbulence and social entrepreneurship’s digital collaboration. This model and event-ordered matrix represent the main theoretical contributions to the literature on social entrepreneurship and crisis.