From Vulnerability to Resilience : developing a strategic ability to manage risks in SMEs

There has been a lack of research on risk management in SMEs over the past years, however, interest for this increasingly important area is growing. Brustbauer (2016) and St-Pierre and El Fadil (2017) for example, have started to lay the foundations of a strategic risk management in SMEs (ERMSME or Enterprise Risk Management for SMEs). This reflects the way SMEs can overcome the vulnerabilities often due to their main specificities (e.g. proximity, limited resources, and strategic myopia). Such firms can thus develop resilience helping them to face multiple risks, often resulting in chains of risks when they design their development strategies. We propose here the foundations of what could be a strategic capability of risk management for SMEs, taking into account recent work on this issue (Brustbauer, 2016, St-Pierre and El Fadil, 2017) as well as an analysis of contributions selected for this special issue on risk management by SMEs in different contexts (internationalisation, integration into supply chain or partnership).