A direct response to the seven European CEOs who wrote an open letter, — with the EU Directorate in mind — and also to every large-company leader in Europe watching this unfold.
By Paul Hobcraft | Creator, IIBE Framework | Ecosystems4Innovating | May 2026
This week, seven of Europe’s most significant technology CEOs did something genuinely rare.
Christophe Fouquet, Guillaume Faury, Börje Ekholm, Arthur Mensch, Justin Hotard, Christian Klein, and Roland Busch agreed on a single text, signed it together, and pushed it into national newspapers across eight countries. These CEO’s represent ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens.
€417 billion in revenues.
€1.1 trillion in market capitalisation.
957,000 high-tech jobs.
€40 billion in annual R&D.
213,000 patents.
That is not a symbolic gesture. That is sovereign-scale industrial weight applied to a public argument.
And the argument is correct: Europe keeps inventing what others end up scaling. Fragmented markets. Overlapping rules. A regulatory reflex that governs rather than builds. A capital union still on paper.
I respect the letter. I respect what it took to produce it.
But I want to say something directly to those seven leaders — and to every CEO of a large European company reading this:
You named it. That means you now own it.
Naming is not enough.
The Draghi report named it in 2024. The Letta report named it in 2024. The European Commission named it. Member state governments named it. And in September 2025, Draghi himself confirmed that every single challenge he had identified had worsened since publication.
Naming without providing suggested solutions, in this case a missing architecture produces exactly that result. Recognition without structural change.
The letter calls for a dedicated forum. A ministerial body. A place where business and political leaders can continuously align.
A forum is where you talk about the problem. What you need is a framework for owning it and that needs a radical shift in individual CEO’s mindsets into a collaborative one where Ecosystem thinking replaces the single organization design
Here is what is missing — and it applies to every large company in Europe, not just these seven who are challenging the existing conditions, rightly so.
When those seven CEOs look at each other across a room, what they see is seven extraordinary organisations. World-class capabilities. Irreplaceable IP. Deep domain intelligence. Sovereign-level technology assets.
What they do not yet have — and what no large European industrial company currently has — is a shared architectural framework that connects those capabilities into compounding ecosystem advantage rather than leaving them as adjacent strengths that occasionally intersect through bilateral deals.
That is the gap. Not the regulatory environment. Not the capital markets. Not the political will.
I wrote two pieces as direct responses that add more to my argument and suggested solution here. “Europe Doesn’t Have a Coordination Problem“ and a companion piece “The Diagnostic Europe Needs“
The gap is the absence of an ecosystem design framework that converts individual capability into structural, scalable, collective momentum.
This is the shift from open innovation thinking — which Europe has mastered — to genuine ecosystem architecture, which Europe has not yet built for accelerating and maturing innovation.
Open innovation moves knowledge across boundaries. Ecosystem architecture builds the structural conditions under which that knowledge compounds, scales, and generates advantages that no single actor could produce alone and exchange this knowledge across boundaries in collaborative environments (closed more than open).
Open innovation works well for start-ups, for regional cluster hubs, for establishing innovation inside companies to begin collaboration or to introduce the principles, tools and methodologies needed. What it does not do a good job at is for innovations that are complex in solutions that need maturing across organizations, it was not conceived for that.
The seven companies that signed that letter are operating at the open innovation frontier. None of them — individually or collectively — has yet made the architectural move into ecosystem design at European industrial scale.
What ecosystem design thinking would change — immediately.
If those seven CEOs walked into their next meeting — whether with each other, with the broader industrial forum they are proposing, or with EU institutions — with an ecosystem design framework in hand, four things would change.
Speed.
The cycle compression problem is not fundamentally regulatory. It is architectural. An ecosystem design framework identifies exactly where decision-cycle time collapses in the governance stack and what structural intervention would compress it — without requiring authoritarian coordination or pre-market permissiveness.
Scope.
The regulatory scope constraint is real. But the bilateral scope constraint — the one these seven companies impose on themselves through bilateral optimisation logic — is equally real and entirely within their own power to change. An ecosystem framework maps the scope that is currently locked inside individual actor boundaries and shows what shared architecture would release it.
Scale.
Scale is not the problem. Scale is the output of Speed, Scope, and Structural architecture functioning together. Every intervention that targets Scale without addressing its causal foundations will produce the same result: ambition that fragments at velocity rather than compounds toward competitive advantage.
Structure.
The structural intervention Europe needs is not another forum. It is an orchestration function — connecting intelligence to governance to action across the emergence sequence — that no layer in the current governance stack performs. An ecosystem design framework makes that function visible, designable, and deployable.
The proposal possibly hiding inside the letter.
Buried in the letter is a phrase that most readers passed over:
“We are the nucleus of the powerful ecosystems that form the foundation of Europe’s technological sovereignty.”
That sentence is an ecosystem architecture claim. It is the most important thing in the letter. And it is entirely unsubstantiated by the structural design of what the letter proposes.
Nuclei without connective architecture are not an ecosystem. They are a collection of centres of gravity with no orbital structure between them.
The IIBE — the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem framework — is the architectural instrument that converts that claim into a structural reality. It provides the diagnostic language, the design methodology, and the emergence sequence that transforms “we are the nucleus” from an assertion into a functioning platform.
Applied to the seven signatory companies and their surrounding industrial and institutional architecture, it produces a precise map of the alignment gaps, governance tensions, and value flow breakdowns that the letter names in aggregate — and a specific intervention architecture for closing them.
To the seven CEOs — and to every large-company leader in Europe reading this.
You have already done the hardest thing. You named the problem publicly, with your names attached, in eight countries simultaneously.
The next step is not a forum. It is a framework.
Take the ecosystem design thinking approach into your next meeting. Make the diagnostic conversation — what are the specific architectural gaps between us, how do we map them, what does a shared emergence platform look like — the central debate rather than a side discussion. Walk into the EU institutional conversation not with a request for a forum but with a structural proposal built on a diagnostic that shows precisely where the architecture needs to change and what building it would produce.
That proposal exists. The framework that generates it exists.
The question is whether the organisations with the weight to act on it choose to own the solution with the same conviction they brought to naming the problem.
The letter is evidence of the will. The IIBE is the architecture of the way.
The IIBE — Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem — is a framework for ecosystem design, diagnostic, and strategic emergence developed over two decades of work at the intersection of platform economics, AI integration, and complex industrial systems.
If this resonates with where your organisation is navigating, I welcome the conversation.
Tagging: @Christophe Fouquet @Guillaume Faury @Börje Ekholm @Arthur Mensch @Justin Hotard @Christian Klein @Roland Busch
Paul Hobcraft
Creator, Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) Framework
Founder, Ecosystems4Innovating | paul4innovating.com | agilityinnovation.com