NEW YORK - Challenging times can bring new growth for companies that make it their mission to thrive and not merely survive. But to get there, instead of fixating on risk and uncertainty, it is critical to focus on uncovering hidden opportunities.

Jump Associates, a research and strategy firm helping companies create new ways to grow, offers these five tips on how business leaders can drive growth during an impending recession:

1. Know yourself. Successful innovators play to their strengths. When the going gets tough, there's no margin for error. You can't afford to waste time, money or talent trying to become some other organization. Instead, now is the time to take a good, hard look at what you've got and deploy it to your best advantage. Consider beginning an innovation capabilities audit, a retrospective portfolio analysis and broad stakeholder interviews to identify unique areas of strength.

2. Know your customer. The most successful products and services go beyond functional benefits to satisfy deeper, more emotional needs. Understanding and connecting with those needs requires empathy. When times are hard, people stand by companies that go the extra mile to understand what's happening in their lives and help them find solutions to their problems. Now is the time to develop or deepen your customer empathy through grassroots outreach, emotional-insights research and the co-creation of new products and services with ordinary people.

3. Know your strategy. Constraints provide focus and increase creativity. Contrary to popular belief, the most successful innovations almost always come from negotiating competing constraints -- not from blue-sky brainstorms. Strategic approaches to growth in a stagnant market include reframing your competitive set to discover hidden opportunities and chartering multiple small projects to explore targeted new business territory while also developing the capabilities needed to scale up the operation once conditions improve.

4. Know what you don't know. Build rapid learning and adaptation into the process. Some things are critical to know before you launch; others can only be learned by doing. And then there are all the factors that you don't know that you don't know -- the truly unknown. Innovation tools that support rapid testing, evaluation and adaptation -- such as discovery-driven planning, opportunity mapping and new product and service roadmaps - are specifically geared for finding success in uncertain environments.

5. Know how to lead. Hard times call for courageous leadership. When times are tough, people can get scared. Even companies react instinctively and abruptly, trying to eliminate risk and variability from their operations. A leader with vision counters these tendencies by using uncertain conditions to drive big change. Devise unconventional organizational structures, incentive systems and metrics to keep teams on track and help them succeed, then draw successful practices from these experiments into the core organization to guide the direction of the whole company.