Industry and Innovation

Innovation, Security, and Resilience: Firm Strategy and Industrial Dynamics amid Critical Infrastructure Disruption

Background and Objective

Critical infrastructure (CI) systems, such as energy, transportation, telecommunications, and water, form the backbone of modern economies. These systems face unprecedented challenges from technological disruptions, geopolitical tensions, environmental pressures, and evolving security threats, from cyber-attacks and supply chain vulnerabilities to climate impacts. Virtually no firm can consider itself independent from CI, as infrastructure disruptions cascade through supply chains, energy failures halt production, and transportation bottlenecks constrain competitiveness.

The deep interconnection between innovation and security, what Haddad et al. (2024) conceptualize as the 'security-innovation nexus', has emerged as a defining feature of contemporary political economy. Understanding CI security innovation requires engaging with complex interdependencies where technological capabilities, industrial structures, geopolitical strategies, and security co-evolve. Innovation systems frameworks offer powerful analytical lenses for this purpose (Malerba, 2002), yet CI systems remain relatively understudied within innovation studies despite their strategic importance.

The integration of innovation and security objectives presents also important governance challenges. Poorly designed security governance can undermine innovation by fragmenting knowledge networks, while innovation without security governance increases systemic fragility (McLeish & Nightingale, 2007). These tensions manifest across multiple levels: at the firm level, companies must balance security investment with innovation focus; at the sectoral level, CI operators must coordinate heterogeneous actors; at the policy level, governments must manage trade-offs between openness and security controls (OECD, 2019).

These tensions also generate pressing ethical dilemmas, most visibly around dual-use technologies whose civilian and security applications cannot be cleanly separated. Such dilemmas place renewed demands on corporate responsibility, responsible innovation, and on assessments of the social value created—or eroded—by security-oriented technological change in CI sectors.

Recent geopolitical developments, including the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-US war on Iran, the US-China technology competition, and strategic contests over semiconductors (Huang & Malkin, 2025), critical raw materials (de Cunzo et al., 2025), and telecommunications infrastructure, have heightened the urgency of this research agenda. Critical raw materials have emerged as a key concern especially in relation to green technology transitions, with implications spanning from renewable energy infrastructure to shipbuilding and defence industries. Digital transformation across CI sectors, including autonomous systems, AI, IoT, and cyber-physical systems, is simultaneously reshaping capabilities and creating new vulnerabilities. High-profile cybersecurity incidents in energy, transportation, and telecommunications networks demonstrate how cyber resilience has become a core dimension of infrastructure security (Marković & Kovačević, 2025). Research on cybersecurity industry clusters has traced the evolution of specialized security industries that can themselves be considered CI, yet questions remain about how these industries impact other CI systems and how innovation is reshaped by these interactions (Carmel & Roche, 2023).

From an organizational perspective, security concerns in CI create innovation opportunities for dependent firms while reshaping CI provision itself. Firms perceiving infrastructure vulnerabilities, e.g., geopolitical risks threatening supply chains, cybersecurity threats to networks, or climate impacts on energy grids, develop organizational innovations to reduce dependency and enhance resilience. Importantly, these innovations frequently diffuse back into CI sectors and adjacent industries, constituting a bidirectional dynamic that remains a crucial but understudied dimension of CI innovation. Recent work in Industry and Innovation has started addressing the resilience of innovation systems (van der Loos et al., 2024), but the application of these insights to CI systems remains limited.

We then propose this Special Issue (SI) with the following main objectives:

• Advance theoretical understanding of innovation systems, industrial dynamics, and firm strategies in relation to security and CI systems;
• Examine how technological, organizational, regulatory, and strategic innovations contribute to infrastructure security capabilities and resilience;
• Examine how organizations adapt to security vulnerabilities through innovation, and how these responses generate new organizational capabilities and business models;
• Analyze how micro-level firm strategies interact with meso-level sectoral coordination and macro-level policy frameworks;
• Analyse the role of industrial actors, innovation systems, and policy frameworks in shaping infrastructure security innovation;
• Investigate barriers, enablers, and governance mechanisms for security-enhancing innovation in capital-intensive, regulated sectors;
• Understand cross-sectoral patterns and sector-specific dynamics in infrastructure security innovation, including energy, maritime, defence, and telecoms;
• Critically examine the ethical dilemmas raised by defence and security technologies, surveillance-enabling systems, and security-driven innovation in CI, including their implications for corporate responsibility, the legitimacy of innovation pathways, and the social value generated by firms, sectors, and innovation systems;
• Generate actionable insights for policymakers, industry practitioners, and security professionals.

We welcome conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contributions examining CI system security and resilience innovation across sectors, including, but not limited to, energy, transportation (aviation, rail, maritime, road, pipeline), telecommunications, water, financial systems, and health infrastructure. Studies may focus on single sectors, comparative analyses across sectors, or cross-sectoral interdependencies. We particularly encourage submissions employing diverse methodologies (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, empirical, modelling, simulation) and drawing on multiple disciplinary traditions. All submissions should explicitly engage with innovation theory and contribute to scholarly understanding of innovation processes, industrial dynamics, or policy implications relevant to Industry and Innovation's aims and scope.

Research Topics

This SI seeks theoretical and empirical contributions on the following and related themes.

1. Innovation Systems, Governance, and Geopolitics

Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) approach for CI security: How do security-focused technological innovation systems emerge and evolve within CI sectors, and what system functions (knowledge development, entrepreneurial experimentation, market formation, legitimation) operate differently for security innovations? How do security imperatives affect the development of innovation systems around emerging technologies (AI, quantum computing, biotechnology) whose dual-use characteristics raise distinctive ethical dilemmas for researchers, firms, funders, and regulators? How do legitimation and governance processes within these innovation systems contend with concerns over the militarization of civilian research, institutional review of dual-use projects, and the responsibilities of firms and consortia operating at the civil–security boundary?

Sectoral and technological innovation systems in CI security: How do CI security innovation systems differ from other sectors? What knowledge bases, actor networks, and institutions characterize security innovation in capital-intensive, regulated industries? What roles do defence industrial base considerations, dual-use technologies, and civil-military dynamics play in shaping innovation patterns?

Regulatory innovation and multi-level governance: How do regulatory frameworks enable or constrain security innovation in infrastructure sectors, and what innovative governance approaches balance security, safety, and economic efficiency? What roles do public-private partnerships, industry self-regulation, regulatory sandboxes, and standards bodies play across international, national, and sub-national levels?

Geopolitical competition, technology sovereignty, and industrial policy: How do strategic technology competitions affect CI innovation systems? What roles do technology sovereignty concerns, export controls, supply chain diversification, and industrial policies play? How do countries and regions balance open innovation with security imperatives, and how do "meso-systems" of state-industry relationships evolve under globalization pressures?

2. Firm Strategies, Organizational Innovation, and Resilience

Organizational innovation and adaptation in response to CI system vulnerabilities: How do firms develop organizational capabilities to sense, respond to, and mitigate infrastructure security threats, and what governance mechanisms and inter-organizational collaborations emerge at infrastructure-user interfaces? What organizational innovations developed in response to infrastructure vulnerabilities (e.g., distributed architectures, alternative logistics networks, microgrids) subsequently diffuse to reshape infrastructure provision and adjacent sectors?

Firm strategies, organizational innovation, and business models: How do infrastructure firms and service providers develop and implement security innovations, and what business model innovations emerge around infrastructure security? What strategic partnerships, consortia, and network configurations support innovation in CI system security, and how do dynamic capabilities affect security innovation adoption?

Resilience, supply chain security, and infrastructure interdependencies: How does innovation contribute to infrastructure resilience, and what organizational and technological innovations enhance supply chain security and reduce infrastructure interdependencies? What lessons emerge from infrastructure disruptions (natural disasters, cyber incidents, pandemics, geopolitical events) regarding the balance between efficiency, resilience, and security?

3. Digital Transformation, Sustainability Transitions, and Human Factors

Digital transformation, automation, and cybersecurity: How do autonomous systems, AI, IoT sensors, digital twins, and cyber-physical systems transform infrastructure security capabilities while creating new vulnerabilities? How do firms and infrastructure operators balance digitalization benefits against security risks? and what governance frameworks support secure digital transformation in critical infrastructure?

Sustainability transitions and the security-environment nexus: How do decarbonization and climate adaptation needs interact with security objectives in CI innovation? what innovations address both environmental sustainability and security challenges? What tensions arise between efficiency, sustainability, and security as socio-technical transitions (energy transition, sustainable mobility, circular economy) reshape infrastructure systems?

Socio-technical transitions, ethics, and human factors: How do human-automation interactions, workforce transformations, and skill requirments accompany technological change in CI sectors? What ethical dilemmas arise from autonomous security systems, AI-enabled decision-making, and surveillance technologies, and how are they addressed through responsible innovation practices, ethics reviews, and innovation governance frameworks? How do social acceptance, labour impacts, and corporate responsibility commitments shape the legitimacy and diffusion of security-enhancing innovations at the civil–security interface?

4. Multi-Level Transitions and Sectoral Applications

Multi-level dynamics of transitions with a focus on CI: How do landscape pressures (geopolitical tensions, climate change, digitalization), regime-level resistance (lock-ins, sunk investments, regulatory inertia), and niche-level innovations interact in security-driven transformations? How do security crises create windows of opportunity for radical innovations, What roles do incumbent actors versus new entrants play in security-oriented transitions?

Sectoral applications (illustrative, non-exhaustive): Energy infrastructure (smart grids, renewable integration, nuclear security); transportation systems including maritime and port infrastructure (autonomous vessels, port cybersecurity, supply chain resilience, shipbuilding industrial policy), aviation security, rail networks, and autonomous vehicles; Telecommunications (5G/6G security, network resilience, satellite systems); water infrastructure; financial systems; mining including energy and rare earths; healthcare infrastructure; space infrastructure; Arctic/polar infrastructure and operations.