The Next Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovating in the times of New Normal | UX Magazine

One thing to remember is that future-back thinking must not replace present-forward thinking — they should always be complementary.

• One of the reasons that digital transformation programs fail is that teams will return to their old habits soon after the change happens.
• One may think that the crisis will end someday, and things will come back to normal. But for some businesses, this might not be the case, as this crisis is different.

Some users were hooked on the idea of online shopping and may prefer to keep doing it, and offering only offline shopping might not be a viable option anymore.

Agile methodologies have become a must for innovation labs and product teams. Companies have come to understand that they need to find a way of validating their ideas fast instead of engaging in months’ worth of development to discover they have built a product that no one wants to use.

In the beginning, we had no clue how long the crisis was going to last, and the best we could do was to come up with a hypothesis:

 “If I were a customer stuck at home, working remotely for weeks, I would be more open to buying shoes online.”

Whether it’s an external or internal customer, those are the people that pay your paycheck if you work in the innovation field. 

Innovation teams now have the responsibility for increasing the chances of building products and services that succeed in the market.

While at the beginning of the lockdown, customers were more forgiving as far as user experience is concerned, now it’s no longer the case.

Companies that not only haven’t stopped hiring during the crisis but also secured the future of their top team players are the ones that are going to have the advantage in rolling out the most innovative products and services.

The right talent is crucial mainly due to three things now: 

1. Speed
2. Quality
3. Will to experiment

As humanity, we have been through different times of crisis, but for the huge part of the current workforce, it’s the first major crisis as they weren’t workers in 2007 during the Great Recession. This is something to have in mind when dealing with the New Normal.