An Innovation Revolution (Part 1): Strategy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Innovation   Strategy  

The pandemic is spawning a revolution in innovation that will last way beyond the next few months. Let me explain what I mean by focusing on the natural starting point for this exploration: strategy. (I will continue this look at the innovation revolution in upcoming articles.)

COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on every industry, and it has forced organizations to abandon their standard processes. Simply put, there is no process for dealing with something on this scale. As a result, businesses are having to respond “on the fly,” making up their responses as they go and trying to stay ahead of the rapidly changing environment they find themselves in. That has ranged from the mundane (contactless fast food delivery) to the life changing—numerous organizations shifting their manufacturing capacity to produce ventilators (sometimes to completely new designs) in just days.

There’s a proverb in the English language that says “Necessity is the mother of invention.” We’re seeing that everywhere right now, and it is causing business leaders to recognize just what their organizations are capable of—and that’s far more than most of them believed before. I recognize that a large part of the response organizations have been forced to make has been driven by the extreme nature of the current crisis. That level of performance is not…

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