The rapid digital turn tested universities' resilience like never before. New modes of survival and creative actions were required to cope with the COVID-19 crisis and the extreme upheaval of established ways of teaching. While prior research has explored organizational resilience and creativity separately, their interconnection remains underexamined. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 68 interviews with university staff members working at eight European universities (located in Germany, the UK, Austria, and Estonia), investigating the interlink between organizational resilience and creativity during the pandemic and the abrupt uptake of educational technology (EdTech). We identify three organizational practices which illustrate the resilience-creativity nexus: Accumulating, Engaging, and Reassembling. Accumulating refers to universities cultivating resources and support structures, which may fall outside of normal routines, including investing in technical training and didactic support for teachers. Whereas, Engaging includes practices universities undertake to foster institutional exchange to find creative solutions for carrying out emergency remote teaching. Lastly, Reassembling refers to processes in which universities reinvent existing routines and invent new ones, including rethinking time-honoured teaching practices in light of new technological discoveries. By illustrating how these practices shaped universities' responses to disruption, this study advances our understanding of how resilience and creativity are intertwined in organizational adaptation. This suggests that resilient universities must not only cultivate robust resource structures but also embrace collaborative innovation and flexible reinvention to incorporate creativity and navigate ongoing digital transformation.
