MANAGERS ON MANAGEMENT:INNOVATION, SAYS John Bessant, is to some extent about "imagining alternative futures" – something there's probably no shortage of business people doing wistfully right now.

Bessant, professor of innovation management at Imperial College Business School in London, is a world-renowned expert on innovation, about which he advises the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD and various national governments.

Even so, in the current economic climate he’s at pains to accept that “it’s all too easy for an academic to look on from the sidelines”.

And he acknowledges too that, given the sheer speed of this downturn and the lack of credit in a paralysed global banking system, innovation certainly comes somewhere behind survival on most of today’s management to-do lists.

“It’s very natural to batten down the hatches right now and think about survival, but you still need to think about tomorrow, and you can certainly do that in innovative ways.

“Innovation is about doing what we do better. It’s about incremental improvements, modifying your products, tightening up your processes, making your services more efficient. That’s innovation most of the time – and in my experience, Irish firms are quite good at that.

“The challenge comes when you need to do something completely different – whether it’s opening up a new market, or responding to the fact that someone on the other side of the world has invented a new technology that makes yours obsolete.

“It’s under those circumstances that you need to be able to do something different. Arguably, if you’ve prepared for that by looking in the unexpected places on the edge of your radar screen, you might be in a better position once the crisis comes to do something about it – or you might have had some early warning of it.”

So how do companies go about exploring the edge of their radar screens?

Apart from traditional innovation through improving your company’s products or services or creating new ones, and apart from so-called “process innovation”, in other words, radically changing the ways in which you create and deliver those services, Bessant believes there are two other routes worth exploring.

“With what I call ‘position innovation’, you may have an established product or service, and what you do is change who you sell it to or the story you tell about it.

“For instance, four-fifths of the world lives on less than $2 a day. There’s a huge market – low-margin, high-volume – out there in Latin America, Africa and much of Asia. That starts to change the way you think about who you sell your products and services to – and how you make them.

“In terms of changing the story your company tells, Häagen Dazs ice cream is a good example. They didn’t change the ice cream or the way they made it; they simply turned it into an ice cream for consenting adults and opened a whole new market space.”

Another approach is business model innovation. “The perfect example is the internet and the way it changed traditional businesses.”

Name:John Bessant

Organisation:Imperial College Business School, London www.imperial.ac.uk

Job:professor of Innovation Management

Management Advice:Its natural now to batten down the hatches and concentrate on survival – but you still need to think about tomorrow.

• Next week: Joe Ungemah, managing consultant, SHL Ireland, on how a poor HR strategy can compound your economic difficulties.