I read an interesting piece in B2B Marketing Magazine (www.b2bm.biz/blog) which tried to tackle this question by way of a debate. On the one side, Richard Lloyd, a general manager at InfoUk argued that 'if you only ever stick to your knitting and do what you've always done, you'll only ever get what you've only ever got. History is littered with examples of businesses that have grabbed opportunity and thrived during the hard times.
On the other hand, Stuart Cro, client service director at Marketecture claimed that our adversity will naturally breed creativity. It's unwise to ditch our traditional lead generation activities and go for full blown out viral campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. However, his argument of focusing on many small enhancements rather than one big idea makes perfect sense.
You do need to innovate in hard times, but you need to balance this with optimisation of existing activities that work, asking yourself sensible questions like:
How can we improve the conversion rate for that microsite by 2%?
How can we split test three different offers on our next campaign?
Where can we add 10% to our average customer lifetime value?
The net sum of enhancing the individual parts may well prove much bigger than any one single innovation.
You really go into a lot of detail in this post. I've bookmarked this page for future reference.