Entrepreneurship and resilience

The importance of an entrepreneurial mindset and organizational culture is not confined to crisis situations or preparing for catastrophe. A healthy nonprofit organization will always be looking for creative ways to solve problems and serve its mission in better ways. However, crises can offer special opportunities in the wake of the creative destruction they may precipitate. For example, crises may block an organization from pursuing its routine agenda and require it to "pivot" to new combinations or ways of doing its work. Or they may create new demands and funding opportunities for services to its traditional clientele. While entrepreneurship is commonly associated with heroic individuals creating their own new organizations, it is primarily entrepreneurship internal to organizations, or intrapreneurship, that serves to build a nonprofit's resilience by finding new possibilities to carry on its work and to respond to new opportunities in the community. In pursuit of entrepreneurial resilience, nonprofits can draw on important facets of organizational slack, including underutilized assets and latent entrepreneurial capacities of its leadership and staff.