No risk, no fun? A bioinspired adaptation-based framework for supply chain resilience in Industry 5.0

Should supply chain resilience and viability be based on building redundancies for risk avoidance or adaptability accepting risk existence? Biological systems clearly favour the latter. Organising our analysis around management, technology, organisation, and network pillars, we theorise a bioinspired framework of supply chain adaptability in Industry 5.0. We illustrate framework elements through four case studies deducing major adaptation principles shared by both biological and supply chain systems. Industry 5.0 is unique in its combination of resilience with sustainability and human-centricity, which biological systems widely use in their evolution. Based on the adaptation principles identified, we propose an implementation plan for improving resilience and viability. This plan is based on four major elements observed in biological systems and their adaptation mechanisms, i.e. complexity and variety, information sharing, learning, and recovery. The implementation blueprint combines prediction-based risk mitigation and adaptation-based risk acceptance strategies. We stress that while resilience assessment of individual supply chains is important for firms, viability analysis of whole ecosystems from a human-centric perspective is crucial for both companies and society representing a novel and impactful research direction.