How Small Businesses Leveraged Technology to Survive the COVID-19 Business Shutdowns

This review aims to investigate the degree to which the implementation of technology played a significant role in helping small businesses survive the mandated business shutdowns brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper hypothesizes that technology did play a significant role in this regard. A total of 62 scholarly articles were referenced in support of this hypothesis. The research consisted of five 30-minute interviews conducted with the owner of a small business in the city of Lancaster, PA. These businesses in question must have been operational prior to COVID-19, during the shutdowns, and remain open in the present day. Their responses were parsed for common themes and methods. Goals of this research are to uncover the novel ways in which small businesses successfully implemented technology for the mutual benefit of other small businesses and theory-makers. Some limitations of this study are the small sample size of respondents and the lack of a perspective of small business owners who did not survive. Further research opportunities in this field are numerous. However, this research contends that the hypothesis is supported, and that technology did play a vital role in the survival of these small businesses.