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This research aims to investigate, in the context of a crisis, how adaptive marketing and open marketing capabilities directly contribute to enhance SMEs' business model innovation taking into consideration the mediating role of strategic flexibility.

Based on a sample of 120 small firms, our theoretical model is tested through a cross-sectional study. PLS-SEM is applied as the analytical technique.

The results show that open marketing capabilities are positively related to business model innovation and that this relationship is partially mediated by strategic flexibility. Furthermore, adaptive market experimentation capabilities enhance business model innovation only when fully mediated by strategic flexibility.

Extending existing explorative research, our research illuminates how adaptive market experimentation and open marketing capabilities, in conjunction with strategic flexibility, can help SMEs to better adapt existing business models during a time of crisis. Our findings underline the potential contribution of planned test-driven activities, trial-and-error processes, data-based decisional processes and benchmarking activities. We also document how stronger networking capabilities and organizational openness strengthen the firm's ability to access the required additional resources and insights they need. These contributions remain however conditioned by the use of a convenient sampling design as well as the cross-sectional nature of the data.

Our findings underline the importance of empowering SMEs to nurture more effective experimental approaches in the long run, along with a more formalized open marketing posture. Our study also highlights the need for SMEs to improve their awareness of the risk of inertia and the benefits of nurturing their overall flexibility so they can adapt in an adequate and timely manner.

The findings of this study build on the perspective of adaptive marketing capabilities and add to the business model innovation literature in two ways. First, our study provides new insights into the cumulative and concrete consequences of market experimentation and open marketing capabilities on small firms' business model dynamics in the context of a crisis. Second, our findings illuminate the crucial role of strategic flexibility which, partly or entirely, contributes to the full realization of the potential of the marketing capabilities at hand.

This study aims to focus on how SMEs have been researched in the first 12 years of the new millennium and published in JRME between 2000 and 2011. There have been many studies on how SME owner/managers do business, their decision-making processes and ways of delivering marketing activities, and many different methodologies have been used.

All of the papers published in JRME from 2000 to 2011 were analysed using content analysis with Nvivo 9 in relation to the SME definitions used, methodology employed, geographical coverage and the business sectors covered.

Within the context of a wider study of 14 international journals on small business and entrepreneurship, this paper presents the findings that have emerged from the JRME journal according to the SME definitions used, methodology employed, geographical coverage and the business sectors' covered.

This study provides some findings in relation to the variety of studies carried out and the research presented in the JRME over a 12-year period.