In an increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment, the ability to innovate has become a crucial element for organizational survival and success. Compassion, defined as noticing, feeling, sensemaking and acting to alleviate the suffering of others, and resilience, understood as the ability to adapt and recover from adversity, are explored as predictors of employee innovativeness. Specifically, adopting a humanistic approach to human resource management, the research explore how compassion fosters increased innovativeness by enhancing resilience. Employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), data collected from 360 employees across various occupational sectors are analysed. Findings reveal a positive and significant relationship between compassion and resilience, as well as a positive association between resilience and innovativeness. Furthermore, resilience is found to mediate the relationship between compassion and innovativeness, suggesting that promoting a compassionate work environment can foster employees’ resilience, which in turn enhances their ability to generate and adopt new ideas and innovative approaches. From a pragmatic perspective, the study underscores the importance of cultivating work environments that prioritize compassion and resilience. By doing so, organizations can foster a positive workplace culture that encourages innovation. This research enriches management literature by offering empirical evidence on the crucial role of compassion in nurturing resilience and innovativeness, thereby advancing discussions on innovative and human-centric work environments.