Innovation In Crisis

Why is a crisis fertile ground for innovation?

If you look back at history some of the worst events in our past have almost always led to the greatest innovations such as AI, social networking and full-body scanners, to name a few. The reality is that as a species, humans are at their best when their back is against the wall. Against all odds, our innate fight or flight instinct kicks in. This is a great time for innovative companies to turn the tables and learn how to protect themselves against any such future events.

White blood cells account for just 1% of your blood but they are always at war. They live a short and glorious life of 1 to 3 days constantly fighting for you. Their role in your immune system is to guard against infectious diseases and foreign invaders. During this current COVID pandemic, you can create immunity by making sure that work depends less on actual human contact and more on recreating those same experiences by enabling the same discussions and experiences online.

A great place to start is to actually turn a negative into a positive by using this rightfully highly sensitized workforce as a great audience to engage. More than ever before, people within your company and innovation ecosystem want to speak up, share stories, give feedback and have a conversation that goes beyond the one way traditional survey that asks for input but leaves the contributor with no real value of how their story and experience will lead to better outcomes. Ask your employees, speak to your partners, reach out to clients and extend a discussion beyond your immediate network by working with academia and the startup community. People are also much more likely to participate when they can get instant feedback and see how their ideas and contributions get noticed, recognized and developed by others.

There are many effective ways to achieve this. Here are three key areas you need to focus on:

Setting Strategic Direction

Extend a community approach that demonstrates you understand that you do not have all the answers, but share the business context that preoccupies you and the areas you are interested in identifying the right problems to solve.

Response to Crisis

Share what you think your challenges are and ask for feedback on whether these resonate with your internal and external communities. Provide contextualized information on your current thought process to deal with these areas and engage your ecosystem to collaborate and finetune the best answers.

An Open Conversation

Transparency and an open dialogue are the best way to ensure everyone feels safe to contribute and appreciate how they can add value that can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. From being heard to being right in the thick of the action as new thoughts are proposed, contemplated and developed for further analysis; this engagement is where the real magic of the crowd comes together, especially in times of crisis.

Based on human nature, good times call for status quo and bad times mean we must change and adapt. In these high-stress situations where lots of new information is becoming available very quickly, it would help to have a platform to engage, discuss and receive more purposeful and focused feedback from the front lines on a range of areas as it pertains to the manner in which this outbreak is impacting how work needs to be organized and delivered.

Now is an opportune moment to make sure your organization is proactively embedding this practice for surveying the market and engaging your workforce and community to have this level of communication and collaboration to be better prepared for future crises. Making an open innovation approach become part of your DNA means driving a sustainable culture that goes beyond innovating by accident or in response to the next unforeseen event. 

Let’s work together to develop those corporate white blood cells that will act as antibodies against this epidemic, and whatever else we will get hit with next.