Jean-Claude Biver was born on 20 September 1949 in Luxembourg City and moved to Switzerland at the age of ten. After studying business at HEC Lausanne, he spent time in the Vallée de Joux, the cradle of Swiss fine watchmaking, before joining Audemars Piguet in 1975. There, he spent his first year on the factory floor with no office and half his salary, observing each watchmaker in turn. It was a formative experience that shaped his lifelong conviction that genuine knowledge of a product must precede any attempt to sell it.

After rising to sales manager for Europe at Audemars Piguet, Biver moved to Omega in 1979 to lead its gold watch division. When industry restructuring followed in 1981, he left without another role lined up. What came next became one of the most celebrated stories in watchmaking history: Biver and a partner acquired the dormant Blancpain name for around 22,000 Swiss francs and set about reviving it as a pure mechanical watchmaker. This was the height of the quartz crisis, when the conventional wisdom held that mechanical movements were obsolete. Blancpain was sold to the Swatch Group in 1992 for a reported 60 million francs.

Biver went on to run Omega for Swatch Group through the 1990s, overseeing a transformation that took annual revenue from approximately 350 million to 900 million Swiss francs, in part through the James Bond partnership and the Seamaster's revival as a mainstream icon. He left Swatch Group in 2004 and, after a brief period away from the industry, took over as CEO of Hublot the same year. At Hublot, he articulated a philosophy of fusion: the marriage of tradition with contemporary materials, and of watchmaking culture with sport, art, and popular culture. The Big Bang, launched at Baselworld in 2005, defined this approach and became one of the fastest-growing watch references of the decade. LVMH acquired Hublot in 2008, partly, it was said, because acquiring Biver came with the deal.

In 2014, Biver was appointed president of LVMH's entire watches division, overseeing Hublot, TAG Heuer, and Zenith. He also took on the interim CEO role at TAG Heuer, steering the brand through its entry into smartwatches with the Connected series. He retired from operational responsibilities in 2018 after more than 43 years in the industry.

In 2023, Biver launched his own eponymous brand, Biver Watches, in partnership with his son Pierre. The brand produces a small number of highly finished watches each year, with an emphasis on movement quality and finishing that Biver has described as pushing beyond what any of his previous brands achieved. Jean-Claude Biver is widely credited as one of the central figures in the survival and resurgence of Swiss mechanical watchmaking in the late twentieth century.