The Market-shaping Potential of a Crisis

A crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic or a cyber attack, not only creates the necessity for crisis management in business-to-business firms aimed at addressing the immediate challenges, but also offers opportunities to shape business markets by changing exchanges, collaborations, and institutions. In order to develop a conceptual framework to capture the market-shaping potential of a crisis, we integrate insights from risk management and strategic management, and discuss their implications for market shaping. As such, this paper builds a bridge between the reactive nature of crisis management during a crisis and proactive market shaping, and offers new insights into market shaping based on an underutilized source of inspiration, namely crisis management. Based on resilience (from risk management) and responsiveness (from strategic management), we propose four market-shaping opportunities. Beyond the theoretical novelty of contributing to our understanding of market shaping based on crisis management, our framework has managerial implications for market shaping and highlights a set of interesting research questions that can guide future studies.