Resilience and entrepreneurial decision-making: the heterogeneity among Italian innovative start-ups

Despite the increasing attention of researchers to decision-making processes, little is known about start-ups’ reactions to shocks. How entrepreneurs of new ventures face uncertain environments and build a resilient business is an open question. Contextual, personal, and heuristics biases influence decision-making processes, making resilience and entrepreneurial decision-making a complex topic to analyse. This is particularly salient for start-ups and ventures in their infancy having limited historical information for developing their strategies. This study paves the way for a comprehensive analysis on how resilience relates to contextual, personal, and heuristics biases in entrepreneurial decision-making processes in innovative start-ups. Based on a sample of 158 entrepreneurs of the innovative start-up scene of Emilia-Romagna, this research analyses through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), their crisis responses, and their contextual, personal, and heuristics characteristics. Results show four types of decision-making profiles related to resilience, i.e. prudent, organized, flexible and balanced, underlining the heterogeneity of profiles embedding resilient capabilities and supporting innovative start-ups to face shocks and challenges.