Innovation is tough in the best of times. What do you do when times are tough and your industry's very survival is in question?
A newspaper executive asked me that question during a discussion this past Monday. While just about every organization is feeling some economic pinch these days, few have it as tough as newspaper companies. Print circulation continues to slide. Advertisers are fleeing to the Internet, where newspapers continue to lose ground to Google, Yahoo!, and countless others.
Newspaper companies are experimenting with new approaches to disseminating content, but those ventures aren't getting big enough quickly enough to offset declines in the core business.
To their credit, most newspaper executives with whom I've spoken recognize that they have to keep pushing. They know they have little hope of maintaining their relevance if they don't innovate. Yet, the pressure to staunch the bleeding in the core business makes it incredibly difficult to do things differently, to commit to innovating.
It's a tough challenge, and it highlights for other businesses that maybe aren't in the dire situation that newspapers are just how important it is to start innovation efforts when times are good, when you have the time and resources to allow your efforts to reach escape velocity. Had the newspaper industry really pushed the innovation agenda in the mid 1990s, we would be having a very different conversation today.
Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Management blog.