Meeting challenges with resilience – How innovation projects deal with adversity

Innovation project management is never easy—adversities like budget cuts, fluctuation, and conflicts constantly patter project teams. Recent events of the corona pandemic further complicate matters with restrictions, lockdowns, and uncertainty. This situation urges project leaders and companies to find ways to deal with adverse conditions and simultaneously pursue ambitious project goals. The concept of resilience offers a promising approach for the individual and the project team to deal with adversities. Innovation resilience behaviour aims to enable project teams to identify whether a project is getting off-track and to get it back on track again. This study empirically investigates the relationship between innovation resilience behaviour, project adversities, and project success using 87 innovation project teams. The results show that innovation resilience behaviour positively relates to project success. We further find evidence that innovation resilience behaviour becomes more critical when adversity increases.