Handling recurrent adversities among Chinese ventures: a dynamic capability approach to building dynamic response capabilities

Handling recurrent adversities is a chronic challenge that entrepreneurs and managers face in sustaining their ventures. With data from four longitudinal Chinese case studies, we examine how entrepreneurs and their firms develop response capabilities to manage recurrent events as an important element of the entrepreneurial process. We distinguished between expected and unexpected events/adversities that materially change how entrepreneurs prepare and enact responses. We provide a new conceptual framework containing distinctive conditions and mechanisms that explain how response capabilities form through two types of events and are revised in ways that make them useful and valuable to future adverse events. This new conceptual framework reveals three core sub-capabilities – resource configuring, growth path configuring, and operations process configuring – to respond to new and changing conditions.