UK Government figures show that 4 out of 10 businesses and 3 out of 10 charities reported cyber-attacks or security breaches during 2024. Also, the electricity sub-station fire that closed Heathrow Airport in London for nearly a day during March 2025 seem to be becoming more prevalent. These are all examples of unanticipated events that challenge organizations’ day-to-day operations and result in changes to how they work and who they do business with. This has resulted in a growing focus on business resilience: how organization and their employees respond to adverse conditions, whether these are totally unanticipated or tensions that grow through their ongoing, day-to-day business operations. We see many organizations investing in crisis planning and the development of new capabilities (skills and processes) to deal with these unplanned occurrences and to improve their resilience.
However, our research suggests that to ensure success, all organizations need to develop resilience in their day-to-day operations as well as considering the resilience needed at times of major crisis. Organizations do not work in isolation - they are not islands - on a day-to-day basis they work with many other organizations to ensure that they can deliver products and/or services to their customers. As they work with these other organizations, be they their own suppliers, middlemen or customers, tensions, challenges and barriers to working together become evident. In learning how to overcome these difficulties, we see firms learning and developing new capabilities that allow them to be more resilient.
Our research has been specifically looking at the tensions manufacturing companies face when they move from simply supplying products to adding more services in their offerings, which includes the potential to create more sustainable offerings and reducing waste.
The challenges and tensions we have identified in our research relate to all aspects of the business, for example:
The above challenges are common across many different sizes of organizations and sectors.
Our research and experiences have suggested that key to overcoming these challenges is the development of new capabilities in areas such as innovation, developing new customer serving skills, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of customer requirements and how to work with other companies to jointly meet customer requirements. We have also seen some very interesting examples of how working with university researchers has helped companies to develop these new capabilities.
Resilience is developed by ensuring that you are willing to learn new ways of tackling challenges and looking outside for insight into what you can do, towards universities or public bodies designed to support you, gives you insights that you would not get on your own.
To learn more about our research you can read the following article
Burton, J., Story, V.M., Zolkiewski, J. and Nisha, N., (2024) ‘Digital service innovation challenges faced during servitization: a multi-level perspective’, Journal of Service Management, 35 (2), pp. 202-226.
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The writer of this blog post is Professor of Marketing Judy Zolkiewski from Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Professor Zolkiewski visited FRONT research programme during spring 2025 and gave a keynote speech for ResilienceTalks "Resilience in Business and Society: "Navigating Economic and Social Challenges".
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.