COVID-19 and Business Digitalization: Unveiling the Effects of Concurrent Strategies

In today’s fast-paced and globally interconnected business environment, digitalization has emerged as a cornerstone of competitiveness. In this paper, we study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the adoption of digital technologies among German industrial and service sector firms. Our findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst for the integration of digital technologies and that the adoption triggered by the pandemic has had a sustained, rather than transitory, impact. Furthermore, a firm’s size and available resources, coupled with its market characteristics, play pivotal roles in shaping its response. Most notably, however, digital technology adoption is closely linked to the concurrent strategies deployed by the firm to mitigate a crisis’s impact.