The article considers the internal and external factors of diversification strategy. The external factors are exogenous ones, namely, the declining demand in core target markets of an organization, legal regulation, State policy requirements (import substitution, etc.), the emergence of new technologies, high competition, the demand for a related product or service, and the social requirements of the external environment. The internal factors are endogenuous ones, that is, the inability to follow the concentration strategy, risk reduction, the availability of financial funds, unclaimed by key business, capacity accumulation, core production wastes, the synergistic effect of multi-technology productions and the ambitions of administration. The contemporary examples of diversification, confirming the outlined factors, have been presented. The external diversification factors have much greater force, being the element of the «pull» system, whereas the internal factors represent the «push» system, activated when reaching the critical factor level. The paper investigates the phenomenon of crisis as a factor of industrial production diversification. The conditions of implementing the related and non-related diversification in a crisis situation have been assessed