THE ROLES OF STRATEGIC FORESIGHT AND AGILITY AMONG MALAYSIAN SMES DURING THE COVID19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The Covid19 pandemic crises have disrupted the world from a regular and freeflow of business for the entire market including the SMEs. The problem accelerates when the movement control order was imposed to almost all the countries in the world. All businesses suffered from MCO and SMEs in Malaysia faced a drop of almost 50% to their business performance which has a perilous detrimental impact to country. Therefore, this research aims to examine the role of strategic foresight and agility among SMEs during the pandemic. As such, this research will investigate different factors of strategic foresight namely technology intelligence, competitive intelligence, customer foresight and political & environment foresight on strategic agility of SMEs. A total of 112 usable responses were received from SMEs in Malaysia. Findings from the analysis suggest that technology intelligence and political & environment foresight were significantly related to strategic agility and the other two factors were not significantly supported. This study contributes to SMEs by providing information on the elements that could assist SMEs in comprehending their foresight and agility to survive the pandemic.