New Insights on Entrepreneurial Turnaround Strategies

Management professors Dr. Giacomo Laffranchini and Dr. Si Hyun Kim have a forthcoming chapter in the Research Handbook on Turnaround Strategies (Edward Elgar Publishing), scheduled for release in late Spring 2025. “Entrepreneurial Turnaround: A Bibliometric Analysis,” offers an evidence-based perspective on how businesses recover from severe financial distress using entrepreneurial thinking.

What Is Entrepreneurial Turnaround?

When companies face a life-threatening decline in performance, simply cutting costs or restructuring may not be enough. Entrepreneurial turnaround refers to a firm’s use of innovation, bold decision-making, and opportunity-seeking behaviors to adapt and recover.

Why Study Entrepreneurial Turnaround?

Despite its practical importance, the academic literature on entrepreneurial turnaround has remained fragmented, with much of the research focusing on small businesses or entrepreneurs reacting to external crises. There has been less attention paid to how larger firms can use entrepreneurial strategies for recovery, or how such thinking can be embedded in long-term planning. As a result, business leaders and researchers have lacked a clear, comprehensive roadmap for understanding and applying these strategies.

A New Approach: Bibliometric Analysis

To address this gap, Dr. Laffranchini and Dr. Kim applied a bibliometric analysis, a method that uses quantitative tools to map and evaluate trends in academic literature. By analyzing over 70 scholarly articles published between 1975 and 2023, they identified key themes, connections, and emerging ideas in the field.

Bibliometric analysis goes beyond traditional literature reviews by:

• Tracking how research in a field evolves over time.
• Measuring the influence of specific studies and authors.
• Mapping relationships between concepts and identifying clusters of related research.
• Revealing gaps and opportunities for future investigation.

Key Findings and Surprising Insights

Their analysis revealed several important trends:

• Growing interest: There is an increasing focus on how entrepreneurial actions help businesses respond to crises like natural disasters or environmental shocks.
• Risks for Small Firms: Surprisingly, the study found that while innovation is often seen as a solution, it can sometimes backfire for smaller companies attempting a turnaround.
• Research Gaps: The field remains fragmented, with limited integration of findings across studies. Notably, there is a lack of research on how large organizations can systematically apply entrepreneurial thinking to recover and thrive.

Implications for Business Leaders and Researchers

The chapter provides a roadmap for both scholars and practitioners. For researchers, it highlights areas where new studies could have the greatest impact. For business leaders, it offers practical insights on when and how to apply entrepreneurial strategies to steer organizations through turbulent times. As the world faces more frequent disruptions, understanding how firms can recover—and even thrive—through entrepreneurial strategies is more relevant than ever.

Laffranchini, G., & Kim, S. H. (2025). Entrepreneurial turnaround: A bibliometric analysis. In Research Handbook on Turnaround Strategies (pp. 74–105). Edward Elgar Publishing.