Yesterday, I wrote the first five bullets on what to do with innovation when recession hits. To recap, they were:

1. Communicate openly and honest
2. Keep and hire talent
3. Experiment with organizational models
4. Invest in training and executive development
5. Cut back on technology spending, but not technology use

Today, I continue the list with the last five recommendations.

6. Engage the entire organization
To foster a genuine innovation culture within the company the crucial point is the management’s effort to engage the entire organization. To make innovation sparkle many different viewpoints are needed to uncover dead angles. Diversity of thought is obtained by involving everyone from the cleaning lady to the sales director. This strategy is not something reserved for smaller companies. Last year, IBM had tremendous success with the worldwide employee driven “Innovation Jam” event generating more than 37,000 ideas. But less will do, company driven brainstorm-sessions around a good old table with representatives from all departments are surprisingly fruitful. Be warned, however, involving your employees increase happiness at work and co-ownership

7. Cultivate an open innovation strategy
For most companies, innovation is an activity taking place behind company walls in a controlled manner. However, in a globalized and connected world where the whole world is a playground, there is a growing competitive need to uncover many more good ideas for products and to make better and faster use of those ideas. Changing times calls for new approaches. Open innovation is one such approach where organizations open up the product-development process for new ideas hatched outside the walls. The method is well-known and proved by the open source community. And in 2006 P&G’s CEO A.G. Lafley famously declared the goal to acquire 50 percent of new innovations outside the company. Since then multi-billion brands like LEGO, DELL and Starbucks have implemented solutions that make it possible to delegate more of the management of innovation to networks of suppliers and independent specialists that interact with each other to cocreate products and services. We wrote more about open innovation on our blog a while ago.

8. Scan the periphery
Trends, foresights, emerging technologies, the future – they are all part of the new black. Every corporation must strive to catch the next big wave or develop an internal seismograph to register the tremors of a coming change before anyone else. When it looks dark ahead most companies have a tendency to forget about changes and focus on the next fiscal year. Paradoxically, this is exactly the time to scan the periphery for new possibilities and business opportunities. If it’s not possible to allocate the resources or the man power, competent insights have never been easier to gather online for free. These are a sampling of our favourites: Trendwatching.com, Coolhunting.com, Psfk.com, Springwise.com, Iconoculture.com. Yet one of the key ways to implement peripheral vision into the business is to bring in outside innovation and design consultants. They know what companies across a broad range of industries around the world are doing to promote change. Not receiving this information can hurt a company’s global competitive position.

9. Care for current customers
It’s a fact that it costs about twice as much to get new customers, than to retain the existing. That’s why, in times of recession it’s a very good idea to raise the customer service standards. There’s an immense amount of ways to do this, but making customer support a priority should be a no-brainer to everyone, and delivering unexpected pleasant surprises are always a success. However, if you are curious of what to do better, do as Starbucks and Dell, who both needed some credit and therefore invested in a customer-driven idea process: My Starbucks Idea and Dell IdeaStorm. This way of involving your customers has to major advantages: 1. you get a bunch of innovative ideas, and 2. the feedback from customers generate more customer buzz and trust than you would expect.

10. Take risks
Well, the last bullet on this list of What To Do With Innovation in times of recession almost encapsulates the nine others. Taking risks is what every entrepreneur does all the time (trust me, we know at Seismonat!), but as the company grows, so does the fear of risking. To avoid the inevitable takes hard work and a cultural anchoring in the company. Taking risks is both about innovative product development processes as well as new ways of working at the office. The former Oticon CEO and entrepreneur Lars Kolind has written a great book on the subject; The Second Cycle (Kolindkuren in Danish). The book is dealing with what he calls “the conventional corporate lifecycle of growth, stagnation and decline”. Encouraging risk-taking are not the only solution, but it should be a part of every company’s corporate DNA. It’s too easy to rest on the laurels when times are good, but take the current crisis in Bang & Olufsen (they have just lowered their annual result for the third time) as an example of how problematic it is not to experiment and take risks instead of continuing business as usual.

Winners always emerge out of recessions and they almost always beat their competition on the basis of something new. I hope the top 10 innovation advice can be of inspiration, so that your company can come out swinging once growth returns to destroy the competition.