The quarantine and disruption of non-essential activities as measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected all economies around the World. This has had a deeper impact on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies because they have very limited resources and vulnerable supply chain and business-to-business/business-to-clients relationships. In this context, it is expected that after the pandemic many of these enterprises will disappear as the “new normality” will require changes in business and infrastructure management. To reduce this risk, innovation is identified as a key aspect of business recovery in the ongoing and post-COVID-19 pandemic period. This work presents a multidisciplinary methodological approach to guide these enterprises to innovate their products for new markets and making a better use of their limited available resources. As an example of this approach, the research-supported development of a new product for a family-owned SME was performed in a zone with high COVID-19 risk. The results provide insight regarding innovation as a survival tool for SMEs during and after the COVID-19 contingency, and the use of digital resources is identified as the main facilitator for networking and research-based design of innovative products within the “social distance” context.

作为遏制 COVID-19 大流行的措施，非必要活动的隔离和中断对世界各地的所有经济体都产生了负面影响。这对新兴经济体中的中小企业 (SME) 产生了更深层次的影响，因为它们的资源非常有限，供应链和企业对企业/企业对客户的关系也很脆弱。在此背景下，预计在大流行之后，许多此类企业将消失，因为“新常态”将需要改变业务和基础设施管理。为了降低这种风险，创新被确定为当前和 COVID-19 大流行期间业务复苏的一个关键方面。这项工作提出了一种多学科方法论方法来指导这些企业为新市场创新产品并更好地利用其有限的可用资源。作为这种方法的一个例子，在 COVID-19 高风险地区进行了由研究支持的家族中小企业新产品开发。结果提供了关于创新作为 COVID-19 突发事件期间和之后中小企业生存工具的见解，并且数字资源的使用被确定为在“社会距离”背景下创新产品的网络和基于研究的设计的主要促进因素.