The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted businesses worldwide by lowering demand, impeding operations, stressing supply chains, and limiting access to finance. Yet we still lack an understanding of how firms can successfully adapt to this disruption. We examine this issue theoretically by combining arguments around dynamic capabilities and managerial cognition and developing several hypotheses concerning firm innovation, knowledge sources, management practices, and gender issues in relation to firms’ adaptation to this crisis. We test these assertions using data from two rounds of surveys involving more than 11,000 firms from 28 countries both before and after COVID-19 was officially declared a global crisis. Our results provide prima facie evidence that innovators, in particular those who are younger (i.e. start-ups) and those who rely on internal sources of knowledge, are more likely to adapt to COVID-19 than non-innovators. Our results suggest that firms with better management practices have also greater ability to adapt. We did not find systematic gender differences upon examining firms managed by women versus men. Following these findings, we set out several implications for research and policy.

COVID-19 大流行通过降低需求、阻碍运营、给供应链带来压力和限制融资渠道，对全球企业产生了重大影响。然而，我们仍然缺乏对企业如何成功适应这种颠覆的理解。我们通过结合围绕动态能力和管理认知的论点来从理论上研究这个问题，并就企业创新、知识来源、管理实践和与企业适应这场危机相关的性别问题提出几个假设。我们使用来自 28 个国家/地区的 11,000 多家公司的两轮调查数据测试这些断言，这些数据在 COVID-19 被正式宣布为全球危机之前和之后。我们的结果提供了初步证据证据表明，创新者，尤其是那些年轻的（即初创企业）和那些依赖内部知识来源的人，比非创新者更有可能适应 COVID-19。我们的结果表明，拥有更好管理实践的公司也具有更强的适应能力。在检查由女性和男性管理的公司时，我们没有发现系统性的性别差异。根据这些发现，我们提出了对研究和政策的几个影响。