REPORT

IO2 has been designed as the first comprehensive report specifically dedicated to the analysis of the impacts that the COVID crisis had on EU small and medium-sized enterprises’ financial and competitive sustainability. In IO2 all partners will contribute to map the crisis dynamics that intervened throughout the global spread of the COVID and the emerging challenges that faced micro and SMEs entrepreneurs in never seen-before contexts.

  • Highly relevant to EU economic and social priorities
  • Long period orientation
  • Not Economic but grounded on a business level
  • Exclusively oriented toward SMEs needs
  • Foundations for IO3, which stands for the properly fine-tuned and customised operative and managerial tools to boost, enhance, improve and sustain SMEs post-COVID resiliency. This will allow to define, identify and take stock of the best business practices available to sustain and support the resilient recovery of EU SMEs.

The activities carried out in IO2 will produce a stock-taking result that is profoundly different from the mainstream ones. Partners’ interests exclusively focused on the effects that COVID had on Small Business and micro-entrepreneurs (restaurants, artisans, local tourist facilities, etc.), with no sectorial limitation. IO2 is not a macroeconomics analysis but a tool intended to capture the “micro” impacts received by SMEs from a bottom perspective. IO2 will allow the EU entrepreneurial ecosystem to rebound and revise their revenue streams and profitability projections, while establishing at systematic level new trends and dynamics deeply relevant to post-COVID economy and business management. IO2 is instrumental to develop the “inner” bulk of the project represented by the actual managerial toolkit necessary for competitive resilience and long-term sustainability for post-COVID scenarios.