The pandemic showed technology and business leaders that a crisis can act as a catalyst for innovation, removing entrenched orthodoxies overnight. While all innovation requires creativity and action to deliver value, crisis-driven innovation demands creativity and action under pressure — and oftentimes constraint — in response to a disruptive event or trend. Understanding the psychology of crisis-driven innovation is an essential component of building a more resilient future and creating crisis-driven innovation principles.

Drive Sustainable Innovation With Crisis-Driven Principles

Set your firm on the path for future fit resilience against systemic risks by incorporating crisis-driven innovation principles into your innovation competencies and practices. Explore how you can adopt the principles as an effective way to maintain or improve your existing innovation strategies. Use them to understand how you can incorporate learning from those who excelled at innovation during the pandemic, and apply that learning within your own business context. To achieve this, take the following steps:

  • Start with why. Reflect on your purpose. Does your firm have a “just cause”? What is it about your vision, strategy, and culture that will motivate your team in a crisis? What is your true “North Star” that will inspire a mission of innovation and creativity?
  • Assess your future fitness resilience. Explore the potential impact and interconnectedness of systemic risks against your enterprise risks to identify potential resilience gaps. From this, identify the greatest threats that will guide you on candidate scenarios for development. Prioritize those scenarios for ideation by applying appropriate triggers for action and constraints for creativity.
  • Find your heroes. Seek out individuals from across the organization with innovation traits and potential. Who are the individuals that exhibit resourcefulness, dedication, and creativity? Build your cross-functional, diverse teams from those that demonstrate a strong bias to action and a willingness to learn by doing.
  • Evaluate your innovation maturity and readiness. Assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks across your innovation competency maturity level. Map out how to integrate the principles into your existing and future innovation practices.
  • Experiment and practice. Run through the crisis-driven innovation principles by applying the “think, do, apply” model, cycle testing different scenarios and ways of working as you explore new ideas and potential solutions. Keep learning and experimenting.