Innovation in a Time of Constant Crisis
By Jeff Steinberg?
Reflecting on 2019, my consulting work had become hyper-focused on helping large enterprise organizations build new capabilities for innovation. The work often took shape in the form of launching an innovation lab, a startup accelerator, and various forms of ‘intrapreneurship’ programs. I was a busy man, and in many cases, clients were achieving real breakthrough outcomes for their business. This was before the pandemic.?
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, clients began to fall into two buckets.?
First, there were those who saw this as an opportunity double-down on their initial innovation investment. They already had a large capability and saw it as “the greatest opportunity to innovate in the last 20 years.” They needed to double their investment because that's the only way they believed they could survive in the future.?
Then, there were the organizations that began to draw back, to postpone their plans when they were just getting started, and put their innovation programs on hold. Some believed they would not be able to do it remotely, others lost their budget as markets contracted, and others saw it as a cost center and decided to focus on reducing operational costs of running their core business instead. In all cases, these clients wanted to “wait until there was less uncertainty,” both internally and externally.???
Today, nearly two-and-half years after the pandemic began, I am seeing a resurgence of enterprise innovation programs and am once again busy helping clients develop their innovation capabilities. It is both an exciting and pressing time for these companies, as a lot has changed surrounding business since 2019.?
Do I think the clients who postponed their innovation programs made the right decision???
I cannot say for certain that those who postponed made the right decision, but I’d venture to say - probably not. Innovation is not a capability that an organization can or should turn on or turn off in response to the latest crisis. In fact, getting good at innovation requires a lot of uninterrupted practice and repetition for an organization and the people within.??
?“Getting good at innovation requires a lot of uninterrupted practice?and repetition for an organization and the people within.”?
How many of us can claim that innovation is second nature when we practice it so infrequently??
To be good at innovation, executive teams need to practice creating and continuously refining their innovation strategy and making many small bets with investment decisions.??
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To be good at innovation, teams need to practice generating new ideas, running experiments, making data-driven decisions, extracting new insights, and converting that emergent learning into market traction and viable new business.??
To be good at innovation, managers need to practice coaching and making rapid kill, pivot, and preserve decisions. They also need to build and continuously improve systems to support the ‘intrapreneurs’ within their organization.?
That’s how companies get good at innovation.?
When the pandemic was considered “over," businesses that did not seize the opportunity to practice innovating were still in the same vulnerable position, with the same core products now even more ripe for disruption, and an organization underprepared to face the future. They could have been ahead. ?
“An innovation program that is both continuous and adaptive?stands a much better chance of dealing with uncertainty and?constant change than one that is turned on or off in??response to the current crisis or lack of crisis.”?
Since the pandemic, we learned that there could always be another crisis to follow. We have seen several new global social political economic crises emerge. We have seen increasing energy prices from the war in Ukraine, rising food prices with inflation, and environmental catastrophes from climate change. So many forms of crisis. We need to expect it, to continue to work within the possibility of crisis, and relentlessly innovate.?
The pace of change is once again accelerating. A healthy enterprise innovation program is about the ongoing capability for the organization to systematically reinvent itself, over, and over again in the face of change. Repeatable success in a world of hyper-uncertainty requires a constant cycle of innovation with a reliable process for transforming new ideas into valuable outcomes.?
Leaders need to start asking a different kind of question: “How do I build an innovation capability that is going to sustain through future and inevitable crisis?” Asking this question ensures that no matter what the future holds, companies are still in a good position to adapt and overcome those challenges, possibly even to avoid crisis in the first place.?
Overall, this reminds me of a familiar Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” As this reflection demonstrates, the time to start an innovation program is before a crisis, but the second-best time is always now. ?