Innovation Strategies in a Post-Pandemic World – Innovators Alliance

Our guest blogger this month is Soren Kaplan, the Co-Founder & Chief Marketing and Content Officer of Praxie.com, one of Innovators Alliance’s sponsors. Recognized as one of the world’s top thought leaders in business strategy and innovation, Soren is a leading expert in organizational transformation, scalable business models, and disruptive innovation.

Global disruptions over the last three years—social unrest, the COVID pandemic, and climate change-related environmental disasters—have catapulted businesses to where they expected to be in 2025.

This acceleration into the future has opened up new opportunities, inviting creative minds to innovate innovation itself.

In 2021, Euromonitor identified three key trends for consumers: 

While the pandemic resulted in huge losses in some business sectors, it produced tremendous wins for e-commerce, digitally-enabled businesses and remote work platforms.  

E-commerce benefited from the convenience and phygital reality trends and jumped ahead of its expected growth trajectory by 5-10 years as businesses discovered they could bypass retailers and reach consumers directly.

Bottomless, a start-up coffee supplier, grew by 400% during the pandemic’s first year by developing a way to please consumers with convenience, a digital platform, and an easy supply chain. Along with their first order of coffee, customers receive a free scale which tracks their coffee usage and facilitates re-ordering at the perfect time, thereby creating a model for tracking consumption of everyday items.  

Some businesses, forced to close their doors abruptly during the pandemic lockdown, developed creative partnerships and transformed into new virtual brands. The restaurant chain Chili’s, for example, leveraged its assets of 1000 kitchens across the USA and partnered with Doordash to create the virtual offering of “It’s Just Wings.” This innovation birthed a $150 million business overnight and drove Chili’s stock up 700%.

The pandemic required many businesses to implement remote working to keep employees safe. It’s predicted that 44% of employees will continue to work remotely full-time, while many businesses will adopt hybrid collaboration models blending remote and on-location work.

This proliferation of remote workers compelled businesses to find new approaches to facilitate collaboration among team members and adopt collaboration tools, such as Teams, Zoom, and Slack, which have seen explosive growth. 

Regarding the environment trend, businesses realize they need to monitor the ‘triple bottom line’ of economic, social and environmental impacts. 

Two companies addressing excess packaging and plastic waste are Miwa which supplies a contactless process that digitally dispenses bulk foods into reusable containers and Loop which packages everyday essentials in beautiful recyclable containers that consumers use then return (for sanitizing and reuse) when they receive a new delivery.

What will post-pandemic innovation look like for your company?  

In addition to incorporating the above-mentioned trends, post-pandemic innovation will involve digitalization at multiple levels, from digitizing files and contracts, and adopting Cloud storage to undertaking a complete digital transformation of all documents and sequential business processes.  

Although this may seem daunting, Septimatech found it an easy transition with the assistance of Praxie. 

Digital transformation encompassing all activities from strategy to execution can give you a broad view of your business strategy and performance, and dramatically increase your company’s efficiency, positioning it well for the future.

If you would like to network with other innovators, please contact Innovators Alliance. Our peer-based membership connects you with other business leaders, bringing together innovators across the country to gain insight into our ever-changing climate.