Abstract: In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, organizations face the pressing challenge of combining the agility to innovate with the robustness to endure. Innovation and resilience, however, often seem to rest on contradictory logics. Whereas innovation thrives on experimentation, fluidity, and departures from convention, resilience depends on stability, reliability, and alignment with established structures and norms. Rather than viewing these tendencies as mutually exclusive, this seminar explores their paradoxical interdependence – the ways in which innovation and resilience simultaneously oppose and enable one another. The session develops a conceptual reflection on organizational innovation, understood as the capacity to design and sustain novel forms of organizing – beyond bureaucracy, hierarchy, or the conventional capitalist–labour divide. Such forms include open collaboration, platform organizing, hybrid governance, and other emergent architectures of coordination and value creation. Yet while these arrangements foster adaptability and creativity, they can also expose organizations to fragility. Conversely, traditional designs enhance reliability but can inhibit renewal. This tension between generativity and stability sits at the heart of the paradox of resilient innovation.Drawing on paradox theory and related ideas of ambidexterity, hybridity, and robust innovation, the seminar invites a deeper examination of how organizations can navigate, rather than resolve, this tension. The discussion will focus on conceptual strategies for leveraging paradox – such as cultivating both incremental and radical innovation pathways, designing modular structures that balance flexibility with coherence, and fostering reflexive learning processes that transform disruption into renewal. Ultimately, the session aims to advance a richer understanding of how organizations can remain innovative because of, not despite, their commitments to resilience – thus positioning paradox not as a problem to be solved but as a vital source of creative potential.

About Marco Berti 

Marco Berti is a Full Professor of Management at NOVA School of Business and Economics. His research explores how organizations navigate complexity, innovation, and paradox, integrating conceptual depth with practical insight. He has published widely in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Academy of Management Learning & Education. His recent work addresses different facets of organizational innovation – from the emergence of cooperative and hybrid organizational forms, to the role of bricolage in emergent response groups, and the rise of algorithmic management in digital workplaces. Drawing on his earlier career as a management consultant, Berti bridges theory and practice to understand how creative organizing can foster adaptability, inclusion, and social sustainability in complex environments.