In times of political, economic, social, and supply chain instability, it's tempting to pull back and retreat into your comfort zone and to wait for the storm to pass. While a conservative approach is advisable when you're tempted to do something rash, it is not a viable long-term strategy.
If you want to succeed, you're going to have to do something different. That may mean retooling yourself and your skills, to the point of reinventing yourself. For your business, it may mean exploring new ventures, or making dramatic changes to what you've been doing in the past.
In each case, survival hinges on innovation.
It is tempting to connect innovation to technology. However, innovation is not limited to new technology. Innovation literally means creating something new, and it relates to processes and procedures as well as things.
New Technology: New technology can be dramatic and also modest, which may involve what seems to involve a modest step-change. In the oil industry, the shale revolution was made possible by dramatic technological advances in horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing. Later, technology involved small step-changes with logging while drilling, high-performance sensors, micro-seismic -- all about reservoir optimization. Now, if shale producers are to survive $40/bbl oil, it will be necessary to find ways to work with existing infrastructure to go back in and recover the oil that was left behind and not recovered in the first completions. This could involve new approaches to re-fracturing the wells, or it might mean a combination of technologies in order to identify the "sweet spots" and then drill them with pinpoint precision.
New Processes: New approaches to old problems can be as simple as changing / combining processes and steps. Examples include the ways of purifying water so that it can be used for agricultural and community uses. The sources of water could range from water co-produced with oil and gas, or could involve using brackish aquifers or sea water. New processes using thermal solutions or reverse osmosis using high-functioning membrane ultra-filtration are a few examples.
Entrepreneurship: Downturns are often times when great fortunes are made because you're liberated from the constraints of success (being too busy) and you have the free time and the motivation to take risks and propose something completely new. You can scan the environment and determine where emerging needs are, then assess your skills, resources, and networks and determine if it's possible to meet those needs. To take advantage, you must practice a kind of deep identification with your target market or audience in order to truly understand the needs. Then, it is necessary to honestly, openly, and thoroughly analyze all aspects the market. Entrepreneurial solutions do not have to be complicated. They build on your strengths and your enthusiasm. First and foremost, you must really enjoy the process of meeting the needs, and the intellectual challenge of constant improvement, both in processes and in customer relationships.
Clearly education is a part of all solutions, and innovation requires a commitment to lifelong learning.
AAPG Activities and Events supporting innovation: