Last week’s Wall Street Journal gave a sober assessment of the economy in 2024: It Won’t Be a Recession, It Will Just Feel Like One. Economists expect a 1% growth rate in the economy, a drop from the 2.6% in 2023. Rajeev Dhwan forecasts, “This is less a recession and more of a growth stop.”

Here’s the good news: while you should be aware of economic forecasts, you don’t have to be a victim of the economy. You can grow. You may just need to be more intentional.

How do you grow in a slowing economy? A surefire way not to grow is to do the same things you were doing in 2023.

Growing in a slowing economy takes A Strategic Mindset backed by Intentional Innovation.

A Strategic Mindset: Understand What Customers Want Right Now

Renowned innovation expert, Clay Christensen built his innovation model based on the jobs that customers are hiring our products to do. His theory said that customers don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job.

Companies that understand the jobs that customers and prospects want to be done are able to deliver increasing levels of value. More value means more competitive advantage, a higher win rate, and higher margins.

Simply put, value is created by innovating better ways of doing things that help customers get their jobs done.

The good news is that customer needs, desires, and expectations continually change. The job they hired your product or service to do a few years ago may be different than the job they need to be done right now in this current season. Sometimes those changes are big. Sometimes they are subtle. Either way, the company that understands what customers want today is the company that wins.

Intentional Innovation: Find Ways To Do The Job Better Than Your Competitors

2024 is not a year to be sloppy about innovation. Once you understand the jobs your customers want done you need a process to come up with new ideas, validate them, and bring them to market.

Innovation begins with ideation. Assemble a council of employees with Working Geniuses of Wonder, Invention, and Discernment. Dig deep into the jobs to be done. Brainstorm ideas to do the jobs more efficiently and effectively.

Innovation continues with validation. In between council meetings, leverage a proven process to pilot, optimize, and package the ideas for implementation. Some ideas will be ready to hand off to your integration team. Others will need more work. Of course, some of the ideas will fail. But since failure is the “most fertile learning ground on the planet,” (Pablo Giacopelli) you can learn from what doesn’t work.

In all of this, your company will have a continual pipeline of innovation, allowing you to add increasing value to your customers, protecting your base, building competitive advantage, and sparking growth.

Imagine what 2 or 3 great innovations properly implemented could do for your business in 2024!

Conclusion: Will You Make 2024 the Year of Strategic Innovation?

Will you be average and grow 1% as the economists predict? Or will you steward the growth of your business by entering this year with a strategic mindset?

Will you focus exclusively on execution to the neglect of innovation or will you take a balanced approach and execute while you intentionally innovate?

Like all things involving progress, this requires a decision to get very strategic about innovation. And, like all things, no decision is a decision.

Here is a livestream recording where I dug deeper into these ideas: