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Abstract
The pandemic brought many challenges to universities. However, it was also an important trigger for innovation. The social responsibility of the institutions led the universities to transfer knowledge and services to society in a faster way, to give continuity to the educational programs it was necessary to implement online learning through ICTs, changes were generated in the laws and regulations inside and outside the universities and, additionally, actions were taken to reduce the inequality that this contingency revealed. In order to better understand innovations in times of crisis, this research analyses two types of innovation in public universities in Mexico and their correlation with personal characteristics of the university rectors, as well as with organizational characteristics of the universities they lead. The findings of this analysis show that innovations related to transfer to society and actions to minimize inequalities can be explained in terms of the organizational characteristics of the universities and, to a lesser extent, the individual characteristics of the presidents who lead them. These results provide useful information about how universities are organized in the face of a crisis and, above all, about how innovations are generated in them.