Industry has entered an era of fragility. Long carried by trade liberalization, territorial specialization and the global optimization of value chains, it now has to operate within an environment that is more uncertain, more fragmented and more demanding. Geopolitical crises, economic surges and environmental imperatives are putting to the test the industrial and digital system shaped by globalized capitalism.
The pressures manufacturers face have reached an unprecedented level of complexity and unpredictability. Open markets, the lifting of customs barriers and territorial specialization have supported a global organization of value chains built on the pursuit of efficiency, competitiveness and cost reduction. At the base of this system, the fluidity of trade, the stability of partnerships and the availability of resources are now all sensitive topics, with major repercussions.
At the same time, environmental imperatives are asserting themselves as a first-order challenge, with implications made all the greater by how late the awareness has come.
Such a context is forcing industrial companies to reinvent the keys to their solidity and their longevity. That means demonstrating lucidity and method. Thinking through and organizing resilience is an essential component of sustainable performance.
Manufacturers have of course acted to secure their supply chain and their operations, believing they were preserving their operational and economic model. But those levers tend to soften short-term effects only, without truly remedying deeper fragilities.
Becoming more resilient can no longer be limited to the supply chain, to reshoring or to resourcing strategies. It has, on the other hand, a great deal to do with our design choices.
Global disorder
Since the second half of the last century, global production has evolved into a system where, schematically, low-cost countries produce while wealthy countries design and distribute, relying on logistics and information flows to ensure continuity.
This model enabled spectacular productivity gains, amplified by increasingly easy access to technology. But those successes came at a price: the multiplication of dependencies that recent events have turned into vulnerabilities.
The Covid crisis served as a wake-up call. We realized we did not control vital molecules or essential components. Organized around just-in-time, automotive plants faced shortages that brought factories to a halt and put teams on furlough. Subcontractor failures left aerospace manufacturers struggling to honour orders. Stalled production, delayed deliveries, stretched cash flow, with cascading effects going as far as restructuring plans and layoffs previously unthinkable.
Other crises followed: war in Ukraine, renewed flare-ups in the Near and Middle East, instabilities in Africa, the rise of authoritarian regimes, tariff blackmail and retaliatory trade measures. All of this is throwing off the compass of businesses. Yesterday’s competitiveness mantras, hyperspecialization and hyper-optimization, have turned into an Achilles heel.
Finite resources reveal our dependencies
Alongside geopolitical shocks, another reality is imposing itself: we can no longer ignore the physical limits of the world and its resources. Finite in quantity, they are also unevenly distributed. Earth Overshoot Day, arriving earlier each year, and the successive crossings of planetary boundaries, underline the obvious problem of an extractivist and linear logic.
Logically, appetites and conflict intensify: in Ukraine, in the DRC, in Greenland; disputed territorial waters, major manoeuvres around the exploration and exploitation of the deep seabed. All of this reveals the existential challenge behind resources, and the strategic vulnerability of dependency.
Rare earths such as niobium and tantalum, indispensable to modern electronics, are subject to restriction by China, which gives it discretionary power over who can produce and who cannot. Nickel, with deposits concentrated in a handful of territories, is essential for batteries and alloys. The development of energy infrastructure, the energy transition and the electrification of end uses raise the spectre of a looming copper shortage. Phosphates, intensively consumed by agriculture, are concentrated in Morocco and China. Despite its apparent abundance, sand, at the heart of construction, is in fact over-exploited. On a lighter note, a recent egg shortage in the United States illustrated that even the most basic products can be affected.
The vertigo of data
In much the same way, data has become the strategic resource of a heavily digitized world.
It raises fundamental questions: where is it stored? Who controls it? Who has access? What real risks weigh on the underlying physical infrastructure, which is multiplying and is itself hungry for critical components, energy and water?
Seduced by the promise of flexibility and lower infrastructure costs, industrial companies have largely migrated their hosting systems to cloud solutions, becoming dependent on their availability and robustness. While the challenges around value and ownership, cybersecurity, backup and access control are central, lock-in risk is heightened by the diversity of technologies, systems integration and the difficulty of making them interoperable. In particular, physical production, energy management and transport installations are both crucial and highly exposed. Yet the industrial information systems that steer them are heavily dependent on vendors and integrators.
Finally, we are realizing, somewhat late, our nakedness in the face of intrusive policies from the United States or China regarding the use of technology and data. The myriad of data we publish every day is scattered across unknown data centres and exploited in near-total opacity to train AI algorithms. Social networks such as X or TikTok are becoming instruments of influence and of the battle for reality, while the emergence of DeepSeek illustrates the Chinese circumvention of American controls on the latest generation of chips. Even on a topic as intimate as health, the choice of Microsoft Azure to host French medical data in the Health Data Hub raises questions, and shows just how thin digital sovereignty remains today.
The need for systemic responses
Pressures on resources, conflicts of use, regulatory pressure, dependence on technological monopolies or critical infrastructure: these are structuring issues. They affect every market participant and touch every link of the industrial chain, from development to distribution. In other words, they are systemic.
Protecting oneself calls for decisions that will shape the entire product and service life cycle. The trade-offs must therefore be put on the table at the earliest design stages.
Design as a strategic lever of resilience
Faced with this picture, the natural reflex is to multiply defensive fixes: strategic stocks, supplier diversification, protective contract clauses. These measures have their usefulness, but they remain patches that buy time on a system that is fragile by construction.
The real work to undertake lies elsewhere: in design choices.
It is at the moment when the architecture of a product is defined, when materials are selected, when the trade-off is made between integration and modularity, that future strategic flexibility takes shape. That is where a company creates, or mortgages, its ability to pivot, to adapt, to withstand shocks.
Too often confined to its technical dimension, design is in fact a first-order strategic lever. It determines not only a product’s immediate performance, but also the long-term resilience of the company that produces it.
In a forthcoming article, we will explore how to activate this lever concretely: which principles to adopt, which practices to put in place, and how to make design an effective bulwark against systemic vulnerabilities. Because resilience is not decreed: it is built, methodically.
Questions? Our expert is here to help.
Gilles CYPRES
Principal
