Business failure in post-pandemic era: New challenges for industrial networks, emerging insights and market opportunities

Business failure has attracted significant scholarly interest. Despite the widespread business-to-business (B2B) service failures, there have been limited interdisciplinary studies in the context of industrial networks, especially analyzing business failure in the crisis and post-crisis situations. The special issue presents 12 articles that shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of business failure in industrial networks and explore various themes such as the crisis-driven business failure, impression management, recovery from failure, and competitive dynamics. Thus, these articles provide important insights into the two competing perspectives on business failure: the deterministic and voluntaristic perspectives. Recognizing the fast-changing global competitive landscape for B2B firms in the wake of the pandemic and other prolonged external shocks such as trade wars, geopolitical risk, and economic sanctions, it has become increasingly a strategic imperative for firms to develop agile capabilities to be better able to respond to sudden business environmental changes. The article provides important insights on business failure in the context of industrial networks, and highlight potential topics for future research, which could stimulate new fruitful scholarly discourse on external long-term crises and pandemic-induced business failure in the B2B context.