To be somewhat Polly-anna about our current economic situation, I have always believed that we tend to do our most interesting and exciting work when our backs are ,so to speak, to the wall. I set up my last company in the early 90’s during what was a puny little recession in comparison to our current (mighty and global)credit crunch.A friend of mine who was in banking at the time tried to persuade me to stay put in my job arguing that the first two things to disappear in a recession were advertising and training, and with a grave nod and a headmasterly stare he reminded me that we were about to start a business training people in advertising. In truth I think that business was all the better for being a “bootstraps” venture. We couldn’t buy any training content so we wrote our own, we couldn’t hire a sales team so we went out and pitched for every scrap of work. As we grew the knowledge that we could survive and thrive in a credit restricted world gave us huge confidence even when he banks were throwing money around.

Design guru and retailer Terence Conran in a recent Guardian Magazine talked about the Habitat experience in the UK in the 1970’s. Habitat an up market furniture and interiors store responded to the 3 Day week, the energy crisis and the collapse of the UK economy by launching an affordable range called Basics, this was subsequently franchised to a Japanese company called Seibu who subsequently opened stores called Basics which eventually changed it’s name to ………………………Muji.

Just think if you have an idea to save your customers money in the short term, you could end up with a brilliant product or service in a few short years.

Be brave, but don’t be stupid, real innovation comes from resourcefulness and playfulness, when you haven’t got enough to do what you’ve always done do something better.