This project's final report and evaluation was completed on 2 August 2021

Project summary

This project built upon a framework by clustering the businesses for policymakers (more specifically Local government ) to provide a better understanding of the required initiatives/programs depending on businesses’ specific circumstances, including the readiness for face the crisis (such as technology, etc) before the pandemic and the ability and agility to change, innovate and adapt to the new economic and social conditions.

Project approach

This research examines the characteristics that allowed businesses to survive better, re-adapt and overcome the COVID-19 crisis. Those characteristics provide valuable information for facilitating businesses recovery. The research outcomes have been presented in three reports, being the last one an integrative report for the project results.

This project has identified influential factors divided into three dimensions:

1. Human factors – external and internal to the businesses
2. Processes
3. Tools and mechanisms

We found two clusters in the analysis for the three dimensions (human factors, processes, and tools and mechanisms):

• Cluster 1 (group of businesses with less resilience)
• Cluster 2 (group of businesses with more resilience), showing differences in performance. A set of recommendations for the Local Government were developed.

Project achievements

Three reports were produced with outcomes/outputs from this project. The reports have been disseminated through the LGA website and sent to the councils’ members through the LGA. The journal article will be submitted in a high-quality journal. Also, the project has been posted on researchgate.com

Project distribution

The reports were presented to LGA and uploaded to the library.

Through the project, three reports were presented to LGA.

• Report 1 focused on the existing literature on resilience and presented the strategy to be used in the empirical analysis later in the project. The COVID-19 pandemic has derived from an unprecedented global crisis that changed businesses’ operations radically.  The focus of the project was on resilience. By analysing businesses’ resilience and characteristics of those businesses that responded more efficiently, we were able to validate whether the expectations arising from the literature can be generalised to the COVID-19 crisis.
• Report 2 presented the descriptive analysis from the data collected from South Australian businesses (during March and April 2021). Resilience was identified as the key contributor to differences between businesses recovery. Resilience allowed cluster identification based on those differences.
• Report 3 In the final report, we provided a tool that allows connecting three dimensions of business’ resilience with performance: human factors, processes and tooling mechanisms. It is in the businesses’ processes dimension where we observed a positive relationship between resilience and performance.