We need innovation now, more than ever
Eric Holdener
Founder @MOONFLARE | Board President & Co-founder @ Farm2People | ESG leader
We live in extraordinary times and organizations hadn’t planned for it. There are no business books nor MBA programs that have taught us how to respond when the entire economy is in lockdown because of a global pandemic.
A few years ago, I was involved in managing the crisis of a cyber attack in the last organization I was working with. We had clear protocols and processes in place to ensure business continuity. This time it’s different. There are no models that could have anticipated the scale of this planetary crisis.
During times like this, we often see organizations cut back on their innovation budget, even close entire departments, as a reaction to dealing with immediate short term problems. Too often, this reaction comes from a misperception of the role of innovation. Most think it’s needed when all things are going well and when we have the luxury to think about the future.
But cutting back on innovation is a big mistake. More than ever, teams responsible for innovation should serve as the voice of creative options to help executives solve immediate problems.
These teams can find new ways of managing operations, deploying new tactics, and strategies to mitigate the impact of the crisis and new models to jumpstart the activities of the organization post-pandemic.
How will consumers re-engage with brands and their products and services in a period of social distancing that will most likely last for months? Where will their values shift in their everyday lives? How do we propose new and sustainable solutions that are going to be relevant today and for the world of tomorrow?
How will we continue to create and manufacture while going through phases of temporary confinement? How do we rethink supply chain and production to be more agile and to enable dynamic switching from one model to the next depending on the situation?
How do we turn remote work as a strategic advantage? How do we further digitize our processes to enable business continuity under extreme conditions such as now?
These are a few questions that innovation teams can address. However, the mindset and process applied by creative teams are as important as the questions and solutions they can come up with. Innovation brings a culture of prototyping and a proven experience in experimentation through design sprints, so organizations can quickly test and validate ideas.
Let’s not cut back on innovation. We live in an unprecedented time in history where we will need to surround ourselves with people who can help us come up with new models to navigate the unknown because old models simply don’t work anymore.
The question to ask ourselves now is: How do we redirect the effort of our innovation team to address and execute on the immediate challenges that we are currently facing?
Strategic Advisor - Digital Innovation | Designer | Educator
4yAmen, Eric ! Great article... These are indeed trying times where organizations that are nimble enough will come out on top and those that are bogged down by archaic processes will suffer.As Warren Buffett once said 'Only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked'. The tide has definitely gone out and what we all need to display is the ability to adopt and adapt more agile, efficient and responsible processes if not business models. We have all been given the permission to innovate - it's now more than ever a matter of survival.
| Project Manager | Veteran
4yEric Holdener, You're right, not many people could have seen this. I imagine some people had foreseen such events but could not get a collective buy-in. But we have to use this as not only a challenge but a learning tool. In this technology era, the future generations will be able to look back and perhaps use what worked for us but also anticipate. I don't believe "things" will go back to normal or back to what they used to be. I believe it will be a slow process to recovery but more importantly a road to discovery. Organizations need to be resilient like people. People make the organizations.
Brother Eric, innovation cannot be cut if embedded across all the organization, as a culture and a promoted capability. If a company is still in the stage where an innovation department exists, then most likely it still stuck on functional non-collaborative silos and thus, yet very sceptical around the tangible benefits from high investments on continuous innovation. Remember that the most brilliant ideas and opportunities come in times of crisis, when everyone is afraid of losing, the ones eager for winning are the ones who break through. Keep me in the loop of your articles. I am a fan.
Program , Product & Project management professional with solid exposure to Agile Framework
4yThe fundamental thinking should be oriented towards how to live in an altered world or may be to think on how to establish systems in a multiplanetary ecosystem , as mankind wishes to establish colony in Mars, and perhaps this is the time to innovate systems here to the new world order