What Is Survival Innovation?
Survival innovation is innovation under pressure — when the priority is not growth, efficiency, or scaling, but simply staying alive as a person, a company, a community, or even a country.
Instead of long planning cycles, market research, or building a “minimum viable product,” survival innovation is about acting fast, improvising, and adapting with the resources you have at hand.
Core Characteristics of Survival Innovation:
- Urgency first: decisions are made in hours or days, not months or years.
- Improvise → Deploy → Adapt: try something workable right now, put it into action, and adjust on the fly.
- Scarce resources: cheap, small-scale, often decentralized solutions (“do more with less”).
- Purpose-driven: the aim is survival (of people, customers, communities, democracies), not maximizing profit or shareholder value.
- Context-aware: constant scanning of the outside world for new threats, opportunities, or sudden changes.
More:
Examples
- Ukraine 2022–now: Civilian engineers and small startups quickly designed and crowdfunded drones, anti-drone tech, or battlefield software — not polished products, but tools to survive the next attack.
- Online Entrepreneurs after the launch of ChatGPT: Freelancers and SMEs drop long corporate-style strategies and instead pivot overnight to AI-powered services that immediately save costs or generate income.
- Employees after the first Great AI Layoff wave:
- Personal survival: Letting go of toxic personal relationships and/or toxic professional relationships, right-skilling quickly, or creating side income streams online to survive financially.
👉 In short: survival innovation is about what you do, not what you plan. It’s pragmatic, improvisational, and laser-focused on the question: “How do we survive today — and tomorrow?”
Survival innovation plan
If you want to learn how to define and execute a survival innovation plan for yourself and/or for others, contact us today for a free online intake session with free work-advice and free fast learning advice. Please email your mobile number and the link to your LinkedIn profile using this form. Then we immediately will contact you to make an appointment for an online intake interview.
Kind regards,
Tony de Bree
