The Innovation vs Resilience Dilemma

Why CIOs must navigate the hype cycle with more than just a steady hand.

Several years before the pandemic, I was in a regular meeting with University of Georgia President Jere Morehead when our vice president for government affairs relayed a conversation with a key supporter, an entrepreneur excited about Blockchain. It wasn’t a formal pitch, but it sparked a discussion: Should we explore Blockchain for transcripts? Could Bitcoin be a future payment method for tuition?

At the time, Blockchain was everywhere: on stage, in headlines, and in every vendor pitch. Based on past experience with hype cycle peaks, I expressed reservations. The tools were immature, the use cases speculative, and the chances of meaningful, near-term impact for our community felt low. Investing limited resources that early would likely yield little payoff and come at the expense of the strategic priorities we all agreed were urgent and important. We chose to hold off, and many years later, that decision has held up. Blockchain and crypto remain niche in higher education.

In today’s Dispatch, I explore how CIOs can navigate the tension between innovation and resilience: when it makes sense to consider investing in emerging technologies, and when a more prudent, cautious approach better serves strategic goals.

The big idea

CIOs operate within a constant tension: we’re expected to drive innovation while safeguarding operational resilience. These two imperatives don’t negate each other, but they often pull in opposite directions. Nowhere is that tension more visible than in how we evaluate and adopt new technologies across the stages of the hype cycle.

Christensen, Reframed

Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma explained why great companies fail: not because they make bad decisions, but because they make rational ones. They listen to customers, optimize for stability, and ignore early disruptive technologies that look like toys, until it’s too late.

Sound familiar?

The same dynamic plays out inside IT organizations and higher education institutions. We prioritize uptime, security, and standardization. We listen to stakeholders who reward reliability. That’s rational. But if we wait for every new technology to reach the plateau of productivity, we may never be positioned to lead institutional change.

The Hype Cycle Problem

Gartner’s hype cycle perfectly illustrates the dilemma:

• Invest too early, near the Peak of Inflated Expectations, and you risk chasing hype, overspending, and getting little in return.

• Wait too long, until the Plateau of Productivity, and you risk missing the window where technology can actually transform how you work, compete, or serve.

This isn’t just theory, it’s a question of investment philosophy.

Venture capital firms invest in dozens of early-stage companies knowing most will fail. That model works for them because they only need one or two home runs to generate exponential return.

But higher education CIOs aren’t venture capitalists. They don’t get to place dozens of speculative bets, hoping one pays off. Our budgets, and our credibility, won’t support it. In fact, our trust is often built on doing the expected things well: stable systems, secure data, reliable service. We guard that reputation fiercely, and rightly so. But lean too far into resilience, and IT becomes the “no police,” defined more by risk avoidance than strategic value. That’s when we stop being partners and start becoming barriers.

So we wait. We pilot. We form task forces. But by the time the technology is proven and safe, we’ve often missed the moment where it could have reshaped learning, research, or operations.

What’s Really at Risk

Resilience is essential. It keeps systems running, data secure, and services stable. But when it becomes the dominant mindset, it starts to shape not just our risk posture, but our institutional identity.

Innovation gets boxed into “special projects” or isolated sandboxes. And that mirrors a deeper truth about higher education: the entire culture defaults to caution. There are few incentives to take bold risks, and even fewer rewards when we do. The result? Tuition keeps rising, administrative overhead never meaningfully shrinks, and public trust continues to decline. When innovations are introduced, like adaptive learning or AI-driven advising, they’re often layered on top of old frameworks, not used to rethink them. We get incremental improvement, not systemic transformation. And in a world changing as fast as ours, incrementalism just isn’t enough.

No institution ever changed the world by waiting for the plateau. And no CIO ever led real transformation by only investing when success was certain.

The bottom line

We shouldn’t choose between innovation and resilience, we must hold both. Lead both. And constantly ask: When should we lean into each?

There’s no perfect answer. But here’s what helps:

• Know your institutional appetite for risk and lead conversations that challenge it.

• Pick smart bets aligned with mission and strategy, not just market hype.

• Create slack in your portfolio so you can place a few well-timed bets without jeopardizing your core.

• Speak both languages of disruption and continuity, fluently and often.

This is the work now. Not choosing between innovation and resilience, but learning how to lead from the tension between them.