{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02530755711775044, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 6.115, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Enhancing Firms’ Financial Support Decision-Making with Predictions of Technological Resilience to Economic Crises

Economic crises of different durations, intensities and geographic scopes are often appearing in market-based economies, while at the same time the economic stability periods become shorter. They have several negative impacts on firms, which include a decrease of their technological investments in various technological resources (e.g., production equipment, ICT, etc.). This can result in firms’ technological backwardness and obsolescence, and finally lower competitiveness and growth, or even threaten the survival of many firms. At the same time, economic crises can have some positive impacts on firms as well, as they put pressure on them to exploit more efficiently their resources by rationalizing and improving the relevant processes and practices they follow for using and exploiting their resources, including the technological ones, which can have positive impacts on their competitiveness and growth. Therefore, institutions that provide financial support to firms, such as government agencies (through various government firms’ financial support programs), banks (through the provision of various kinds of loans), and institutional investors, in their relevant decision-making should take into account not only criteria concerning firms’ economic performance during normal economically stable periods but also criteria concerning their ‘technological resilience’ (with respect to their main production technologies, ICT, etc.) during economic crises periods as well. This is important because low technological resilience in economic crisis periods can result in severe technological backwardness and obsolescence, and finally lower future competitiveness and growth, and even threaten their survival. This paper proposes a methodology for enhancing government agencies’, banks’ and, institutional investors’ decision-making concerning the financial support of firms by adding to pre-existing relevant criteria predictions of firms’ technological resilience to economic crises. Having as theoretical foundation the resources and capabilities theory from the strategic management domain, we view technological resilience as a two-dimensional concept, which consists of a) the extent of reduction of technological investments during economic crises, and b) the extent of rationalization and improvement of their technological resources’ exploitation processes and practices during economic crises. These predictions are based on existing data from government agencies (Statistical Authorities), which are used to construct relevant prediction models through artificial intelligence techniques from the area of machine learning. Also, an application of this methodology is described, which gives satisfactory results.