Seven of Europe’s most significant industrial leaders have written an open letter last week, Read it carefully ( provided at the end of this article) — not for its political framing, not for its diplomatic language — but for what it says beneath the surface. We do need to pay attention and we need to find solutions, both short term and long-term
It can become a pivotal moment in European Technology and Industrial businesses future.
These technology and industry leaders are not start-ups seeking support. These are not trade associations lobbying for advantage. These are the chief executives of companies that between them employ hundreds of thousands of people, anchor entire industrial ecosystems, and carry a significant share of Europe’s capacity to compete at global industrial scale.
They are saying, in public, that something structural is wrong.
A letter written by seven CEOs is not a policy request. It is a structural diagnosis attempting to become visible.
What they have named — fragmentation, regulatory friction, insufficient scale, the absence of coordinated industrial ambition — are symptoms. So do we understand the cause?
The environment into which this letter has landed is fraught in this present time. Brussels politics and European business do not share a common reading of the problem to find the mechanisms to resolve the issue. Each interprets the other’s position through a frame that makes the other’s concerns seem secondary. This gap is not incidental. It is itself a symptom of the same structural failure the seven CEOs are pointing at.
When business and policy cannot find common ground, the problem is almost never bad faith. It is the absence of a shared architecture — a common structural language in which both the political and the commercial readings of the problem can locate themselves simultaneously.
Europe did not arrive at this moment through poor decisions. It arrived here through a predictable consequence of building very well at one level of a value creation chain whilst the levels above it remained unbuilt.
Within my IIBE framework – the Intelligent Intergrated Business Ecosystem framework- built to evaluate and build out business ecosystems, there is a central construct that provides an Intelligence Engine. Part of this is the ability to assess the present Flow- Form and Fusion stages ecosystems need to pass through- the operational mechanism that turns intelligence into structural reality — aligning actors, shaping roles, and enabling coordinated action.
Let me explain these within this European context a little more, from the initial post I initially discussed this “Europe Doesn’t Have a Coordination Problem….It Has an Ecosystem Architecture Problem”
What Europe built — and built well
Europe constructed world-class Flow infrastructure. Horizon programmes, the European Innovation Council, cluster initiatives, university-industry partnerships, regional innovation hubs — these are serious, well-funded, institutionally sophisticated mechanisms for moving knowledge, talent, capital, and signal across organisational and national boundaries.
The culture of open innovation — sharing ideas across firm boundaries, building collaborative research programmes, connecting start-ups with industrial partners — is genuinely embedded in European industrial practice. This is not a small achievement. It is the foundation on which everything that follows must be built.
Flow is real. Flow is strong. Flow is not the problem.
Where the chain breaks
Flow produces knowledge in motion. It circulates ideas, generates collaborative projects, surfaces innovation signals, and connects actors who would otherwise operate in isolation.
What Flow does not produce — and was never designed to produce — is the structural conditions under which that knowledge compounds. A piece of knowledge that travels from a research institution to a company through an open innovation mechanism generates a transaction. It does not generate a structural relationship. When the project ends, the connection attenuates. The knowledge moves on. The potential for compounding value does not accumulate.
The transition from Flow to Form requires more than knowledge exchange. It requires trust architecture — designed, not assumed. It requires governance frameworks that define how actors relate to one another structurally rather than transactionally. It requires shared intelligence infrastructure that allows the network to read its own signals. It requires role clarity across the actors involved — who leads, who follows, who holds the shared layer, who captures what value.
Europe produces collaborative projects. It rarely produces structural conditions. The difference is that projects end. Structural conditions persist, compound, and generate advantage over time.
Europe has mastered the movement of knowledge. It has not yet designed the conditions under which knowledge compounds.
Form is where European industrial collaboration weakens. Bilateral partnerships, negotiated consortia, platform programmes — these gesture toward Form. They are not Form. They produce the appearance of structural relationships whilst preserving the underlying logic of independent actors transacting with each other.
Above Form lies Fusion — the stage at which structural relationships generate emergent capabilities that no single actor planned or could have produced alone. Fusion is where compounding value becomes self-reinforcing. Where the ecosystem generates advantages that outlast any individual transaction or collaboration. Where the whole becomes genuinely, measurably greater than the sum of its parts.
Europe has almost no examples of Fusion-stage industrial architecture at scale. ASML’s supply chain design is a partial case — not designed as ecosystem architecture but achieving some of its properties through structured interdependency. Airbus is another partial case. Both are exceptional. Neither is a repeatable model, because neither was designed using a design discipline. Both emerged despite the absence of intentional Fusion-stage architecture.
This is the causal chain and its effect. Excellent Flow infrastructure. Fragile, transactional Form. No Fusion. The seven CEOs’ letter is the sound of that causal chain becoming audible at board level. They are right to raise their concerns and challenge the present position but it needs a clear-eyed approach to a more comprehensive (and progressive) Ecosystem thinking and design.
The moment matters. Open letters from industrial leaders at this level are rare. They signal a threshold of discomfort that has been crossed. The question is not whether Europe has a structural problem — the letter confirms that it does. The question is whether the response will be architectural or political. Only an architectural response changes the underlying conditions.
******
Open letter from seven technology companies headquartered in Europe calling for swift government action across Europe to ensure that conditions for global technology leadership in Europe will be safeguarded.