How can you build resilience through innovation?
Resilience isn’t about bouncing back. It’s about launching forward—stronger, smarter, and more strategically aligned.
When disruption hits; pandemic, war, inflation, AI shocks, supply chain breakdown, it exposes what a business really runs on. Is it inertia, or intent? Flexibility, or fear? Strategy, or scrambling?
The past few years have shown us one thing very clearly: the world doesn’t slow down for your business to catch up. If you’re not adapting, you’re retreating. And if you’re only reacting, you’re not building resilience.
This is why I believe innovation – specifically Breakthrough Innovation (BTI) – is no longer optional, but a primary lever to build resilience.
Not the kind of innovation that makes for good press releases. We’re talking about *commercialising assets, offers, and technologies that strongly impact your market and your ability to deliver.*
Breakthrough Innovation isn’t just about disruption. It’s about deliberate, strategic transformation, on your terms, in your context, with your capabilities.
Let’s break this down.
Photo by Kirsten Kluge on Unsplash
Resilience is not just Risk Management
Most business continuity plans are built to absorb shocks. That’s a start, but it’s not enough. True resilience isn’t about surviving. It’s about shaping your future despite the shock.
In short, Breakthrough Innovation builds strategic resilience.
- It helps firms anticipate and respond to change, not just recover from it.
- It finds new value pools and creates new competitiveness.
- It turns latent capabilities into active opportunities.
Think about Ørsted. At one point, 80% of revenue came from fossil fuels. But through bold investment and strategic repositioning, they transformed into the global leader in offshore wind. They didn’t hedge their bets they built a new game. That’s BTI in action: delivering sustainability and profitability in the same move.
The Problem: Most firms aren’t set up to deliver breakthroughs
The temptation in crisis is to play it safe. Trim the fat. Pause innovation. Double down on what you know.
But here’s the paradox: **breakthroughs often come from what you *already* have, as long as you can see it clearly and organise it well.**
The idea of a BTI “Operating System” or “BIOS” is designed to address exactly this. It’s a structured approach to help firms:
- Uncover the right playing fields—where new technologies and business models intersect with emerging needs.
- Build the strategic case for innovation that aligns with business goals.
- Deliver the capability to move fast, de-risk new initiatives, and scale only what works.
In times of crisis, this isn’t just good practice. It’s essential.
From Fog to Focus: Matching Innovation Strategy to uncertainty
In times of crisis, planning might feel impossible. There are too many unknowns. Too much ambiguity. But there *is* a way to think clearly: break uncertainty down into levels, and match the right innovation approach to each.
This is where BIOS really shines because it’s built for complexity, not certainty.
There are different levels that determine the right Breakthrough Innovator’s Operating System for you:
Level 1: Sustaining innovations or extensions
Strategy tools work. Use traditional positioning logic. Your innovation strategy here might focus on sustaining innovations or extensions.
BIOS Fit: Not needed here, but your BIOS system might start to surface edge ideas that prepare you for future shifts.
Level 2: Alternative paths
You have a range of options, including mapping out plays, testing different options, and exploring adjacent market possibilities.
BIOS Fit: Explore new value pools. Use the BTI system to frame opportunities—what we call the “Reasonably Addressable Zone for BTI.” These are high-value, actionable breakthrough plays rooted in your real capabilities.
Level 3: Multiple plausible futures
You need structure to think. Scenarios help, but traditional tools break down.
BIOS Fit: Build strategic optionality. Scenario-based roadmapping, a core part of the BIOS, lets you test innovation plays across futures. You’re not just choosing ideas, you’re investing in resilient positions.
Level 4: The pea soup
Everything’s in flux. You need sensing capabilities, not certainty. Think March 2020. Or April 2025…
BIOS Fit: Active sensing and exploration. BIOS includes front-end discovery methods and horizon scanning to find emerging signals and connect them to potential business responses. Your breakthroughs start as early moves here, mapped, but not forced.
The 5 innovation resilience levers—Powered by the BIOS
Let’s bring this home. These five innovation levers build resilience, and each one is amplified when you apply BIOS.
Anticipate Emerging Landscapes
Without a forward view, you’re just guessing. Roadmapping and sensing the front-end of BIOS to bring structure to the chaos.
BIOS enables you to:
– Spot shifts in customer needs and tech capabilities.
– Map your innovation intent across time horizons.
– Align resources and leadership with the right ambitions.
Use case: A packaging client used the BTI front-end to spot sustainability as both risk and opportunity, then acted decisively to create new partnerships, offers, and IP.
Reconfigure assets, not just products
Your innovation edge often lies within your current stack—IP, expertise, supply chains, and customer relationships.
BIOS helps you:
– Recombine existing assets into new solutions.
– Shift from physical products to hybrid or service-based offers.
– Identify latent value in data, brand, and technical know-how.
BIOS insight: Don’t hunt unicorns. Look for sleeping dragons in your own basement.
Find and enter new Value Pools
Breakthroughs often start by asking, “Where is value moving?” BIOS encourages firms to look beyond existing markets and into emerging arenas such as climate tech, circular economy, digitised services, etc.
BIOS enables you to:
– Define strategic playing fields where your technologies and business models can win.
– Map market shifts and signal alignment.
– Focus investment where disruption becomes an advantage.
Build a resilient portfolio of strategic options
Crisis punishes overcommitment to a single path. BIOS provides a portfolio approach—de-risked, staged, and prioritised.
With BIOS , you:
– Test innovation plays with real users.
– Create “Lean Scale-Up” pathways to move from pilot to growth.
– Fund what works, shelve what doesn’t—with confidence.
BIOS method: Small bets. Smart signals. Scalable success.
Embed agility into your Innovation System
Innovation isn’t a side hustle. It must become part of how your business responds. BIOS shifts your structure to support this.
We help firms to:
– Break down silos and align innovation to strategy.
– Build shared language between technical, commercial, and executive teams.
– Create governance that accelerates, rather than stalls, innovation.
BIOS outcome: From ad-hoc ideas to a repeatable, resilient system for breakthroughs.
Build resilience through innovation from the top down
Resilient innovation starts at the top. You don’t need to have all the answers, but you do need to ask the right questions.
With BIOS , leaders can:
– Set a breakthrough ambition that’s bold but realistic.
– Prioritise innovation aligned with real business outcomes.
– Protect innovation capability—even when budgets tighten.
– Integrate innovation planning with strategic execution.
Your job isn’t to guess the future. It’s to design optionality into the system—and enable your teams to move when the signal comes.
Final Thought: Don’t waste the crisis
Crises reveal what’s broken. But they also reveal what’s possible.
Firms that use disruption as a trigger for breakthrough thinking don’t just survive, they gain long-term advantage. But only if they act decisively, and with a system that turns ambition into progress.
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff to President-elect Barack Obama
The Breakthrough Innovation Operating System is that system.
– It’s built to handle uncertainty.
– It integrates strategy, technology, and execution.
– It transforms resilience from a hope into a habit.
So ask yourself:
– What value pools are opening up that we’re not playing in?
– Which of our assets could be leveraged differently?
– Do we have a structured path to breakthrough, not just incremental change?
And if not? Now’s the time to build one.
I help innovation leaders create breakthrough innovation that shifts the needle and transforms their products, services, technologies and business models. Book a call with me to find out more.