Understanding the survival strategies: organization resilience and innovative capabilities in post-pandemic East Asia

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly and globally impacted and even disrupted corporate operations to a considerable extent, compelling businesses to confront changing supply chain environments, unstable market demands and internal contradictions. We argue that East Asian enterprises that have survived the pandemic have learned from their experiences, transforming these into key strategic capabilities in innovation, operational efficiency, customer relationships and employee management to ensure resilience in volatile and hostile environments. One universal lesson learned is that the survival of businesses integrates resilience, sustainability and a people-oriented perspective. This special issue focuses on the business organizations and innovation capabilities in the post-pandemic East Asian region, compiling the core viewpoints and hypotheses from the collection on topics such as strategic innovation and adaptive changes, diverse teams and leadership and stakeholder relationship management. These findings enrich our understanding of East Asian enterprises’ comprehensive capability enhancement and business model transformation, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.