From vulnerability to resilience: developing strategic risk management capacity in SMEs1

Summary After noting the scarcity of conceptual and federative work on risk management in SMEs, we invite researchers, following the example of Brustbauer (2016) and St-Pierre and El Fadil (2017), to lay the foundations of strategic risk management for SMEs (ERM SME or enterprise risk management for SMEs). It is a matter of thinking about how SMEs can overcome the vulnerabilities inherent to their particular characteristics (proximity, limited resources, strategic myopia of the manager) to become resilient in the face of multiple and new risks, often combined in a cascade of risks, and associated with the different development strategies they must implement. We outline the foundations of what could be a strategic risk management capability for SMEs through a state of the art of recent works on this issue (Brustbauer, 2016; St-Pierre and El Fadil, 2017) and a cross-sectional analysis of the contributions selected for this special issue of risk management by different SMEs taken as examples, in the context of their development strategies (internationalization, integration in a supply chain or partnership).