Revenue Resilience — Meridian Insights' Diversification Cycle

A four-round, advanced corporate-innovation and strategy simulation set inside Meridian Insights Group Pty Ltd, a Brisbane-headquartered, A$96 million business-information company where 74% of revenue comes from a single product line — the flagship 'Sector Reports' subscription. On 3 March 2026 Meridian's largest client, a A$4.1M/year federal department, cancels, citing a free generative-AI alternative; a venture-backed rival (DataLive, A$35M raised) sells real-time analytics by API at one-third Meridian's price; renewal has slipped from 92% to 86%; and two further clients worth A$5.6M have signalled they will pilot DataLive. As the new Chief Innovation Officer you have one planning cycle and a ring-fenced A$12M innovation budget to build revenue resilience and reduce single-stream dependence below 60% within 24 months — applying Michael Rosemann's revenue-resilience and explorative-process-pattern lens (QUT Centre for Future Enterprise). Round 1: diagnose the resilience gap — read the concentration, the renewal trend and the disruption exposure, and decide where Meridian is most brittle. Round 2: fund a diversified revenue-stream portfolio from a menu of five candidates (live analytics API, benchmarking SaaS, advisory services, data-licensing, an AI assistant built on the 30-year data moat), balancing investment, time-to-revenue, margin and deliberate cannibalisation of the cash cow — a portfolio, not a single bet. Round 3: fund an explorative process pattern (signals/opportunity-sensing, a stage-gated venture pipeline, a co-creation lab, or a data-product factory) and govern explore separately from exploit, so the core's 18% margin and quarterly targets do not strangle the new ventures. Round 4: hedge the residual disruption (AI partnership, acquiring a smaller analytics startup, multi-year flagship lock-ins, or geographic/vertical expansion) and pitch the board. The math rewards diversification, portfolio thinking, deliberate self-managed cannibalisation, an institutionalised explore engine, ambidextrous governance and explicit hedging — and punishes the five classic errors: polishing the cash cow, single-bet diversification, cannibalisation paralysis, products without a process, and one-size governance. Final KPIs track the resilience score, single-stream dependence (%), projected new-stream contribution, disruption exposure and innovation ROI.