This is a response by building on Kees Hoogervorst’s analysis at Altair Media — and on what still needs to be said related to the recent joint seven European CEO’s letter of growing concern over Europe and its (eroding) competitive position, publishef earlier this month.
Kees Hoogervorst at Altair Media published something this week that deserves to be read carefully by everyone following the European competitiveness debate. His piece — “Europe Is Starting to Think Like a System” — is one of the more precise and intellectually honest responses to the joint CEO letter that has appeared since it was published across eight national newspapers on 5 May.
His central argument is right: the letter from ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens signals something more significant than a lobbying effort. It reflects a genuine shift in how Europe’s most capable industrial actors understand technological power — moving from a sovereignty logic focused on doing everything independently toward what he calls an indispensability logic: mastering the critical control points that the rest of the global technology economy cannot bypass.
That framing is sharp and I want to build on it. Because there is a gap between where Hoogervorst’s analysis lands and what the situation actually requires — and naming that gap precisely is the most useful contribution I can make to this conversation.
“Europe is no longer asking how it can do everything itself. It is beginning to ask how it can become impossible to ignore.”
Kees Hoogervorst, Altair Media, May 2026
That closing line is the most important thing written about the CEO letter so far. It is also, in a precise and consequential way, incomplete. Because becoming impossible to ignore is not achieved by thinking like a system. It is achieved by being architected as one. And those are not the same thing.
What Thinking Like a System Gets You
Hoogervorst is right that something has shifted. Europe is beginning to think in systems rather than sectors. The seven companies, viewed collectively, form — as he observes — a significant portion of Europe’s strategic technology architecture. ASML’s lithography position. SAP’s enterprise data layer. Siemens’ industrial automation depth. Ericsson and Nokia’s connectivity infrastructure. Mistral AI’s sovereign model capability. Airbus’s aerospace and defence systems integration.
The cognitive shift from sector thinking to systems thinking is genuinely significant. It changes the questions being asked. It changes the coalitions that form. It changes the political language that becomes available. The CEO letter is evidence of that shift — seven leaders from different sectors arriving at a shared diagnosis and a shared public commitment. But cognitive shifts do not build architecture. And this is where the Altair analysis, for all its precision, reaches a threshold it cannot cross,
You can think like a system and still operate bilaterally. You can hold the right strategic frame and still govern by accretion. You can recognise your control points and still leave them as isolated Flow assets rather than connected Fusion architecture. The distance between thinking systemically and being architected as a system is not a mindset gap. It is a structural one.
Control Points Without Connective Architecture Are Not a System
The control points concept is Hoogervorst’s most original contribution to this debate and it deserves to be taken seriously. His argument is that Europe does not need to dominate every layer of the digital economy. It needs to master the points that others cannot bypass — the positions that make Europe structurally indispensable rather than merely present.
ASML is the clearest example. There is no other company on earth that manufactures the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines required to produce advanced semiconductors. That is a control point in the most precise sense: a structural position that the global technology economy cannot route around. Hoogervorst is right to identify it as the model for how Europe should think about competitive positioning.
But here is what the control points concept does not address: a collection of control points is not a system. It is a collection of extraordinary individual assets that happen to be located on the same continent.
ASML’s lithography position is a Flow asset. It exists. It is world-class. It is irreplaceable within its domain. SAP’s enterprise data architecture is a Flow asset. Siemens’ industrial automation depth is a Flow asset. Each of the seven companies holds Flow assets of sovereign-level significance.
What none of them holds — individually or collectively — is the Form layer that connects those assets into compounding ecosystem advantage. The governance architecture. The shared intelligence infrastructure. The trust and data flow mechanisms. The orchestration function that reads across all of those control points simultaneously and generates coherent strategic action from their combined weight.
“The challenge facing Europe is therefore no longer simply technological. It is architectural.”
Kees Hoogervorst, Altair Media, May 2026
Hoogervorst writes this sentence and it is exactly correct. But his analysis stops at the threshold it opens. Naming the architectural challenge is the beginning of the work, not the conclusion of it. The question that follows — what does the architecture actually require, where precisely is it missing, and what would building it involve — is the one his piece cannot answer.
That is not a criticism. It is an invitation to go further.
The Three Gaps the Control Points Frame Cannot See
Viewed through the IIBE diagnostic lens — the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem framework — the control points concept reveals three structural gaps that systems thinking alone cannot bridge.
Gap 1 — The Form Layer Between the Points
Control points generate indispensability within their own domains. ASML is indispensable to semiconductor manufacturing. SAP is indispensable to European enterprise operations. Ericsson and Nokia are indispensable to global connectivity infrastructure. Each of those positions is real and significant.
But the compounding, self-reinforcing indispensability that Hoogervorst is pointing toward — the kind that makes Europe impossible to ignore as a system rather than as a collection of individual champions — requires the Form layer between the control points to be built. Form is the stage at which actors stop operating as adjacent strengths and begin organising around shared governance architecture, common standards, interoperable data flows, and mutual accountability. Form is what allows control points to compound into system advantage rather than remaining as isolated, however exceptional, individual asset
Europe’s seven signatory companies are all operating at the Flow stage. Extraordinary individual depth. Thin connective architecture between them. The Form layer — the governance, trust, and orchestration infrastructure that would connect their control points into a functioning system — has not been built.
Gap 2 — The Intelligence Architecture That Would Make the System Self-Aware
A system that cannot read its own state cannot adapt. This is the most underappreciated gap in the European industrial ecosystem and it is one that the control points frame, by focusing on individual asset positions, cannot surface.
Each of the seven companies has sophisticated intelligence about its own domain. ASML reads the semiconductor trajectory with precision. SAP reads enterprise technology adoption with depth. Mistral AI reads the frontier AI development curve in real time. But none of that intelligence feeds a shared ecosystem signal. The system has seven excellent eyes that are each looking in a different direction, with no architecture for combining what they see into a shared view.
The result is what the Draghi report represents: a masterpiece of static analysis that had worsened in every dimension by the time it was reviewed. Static intelligence produces static responses. A system that thinks systemically but has no live intelligence architecture is not yet a system in the operational sense. It is a framework waiting for the signal infrastructure that would animate it.
Gap 3 — The Orchestration Function That Would Move the System
Hoogervorst observes that what has often been missing is the ability to connect Europe’s strengths into coherent strategic ecosystems. That observation is correct and important. But connection requires more than recognition. It requires an orchestration function — an active capability that shapes the conditions under which control points interact, manages the trust and IP exposure dynamics that currently prevent genuine co-development, and sequences the emergence of ecosystem advantage deliberately rather than hoping it emerges from proximity and goodwill.
No actor in the current European ecosystem performs this function at industrial scale. The EU has authority without sufficient industrial intelligence. The seven companies have industrial intelligence without cross-boundary orchestration authority. The European Innovation Council has ecosystem design capability without the mandate to operate at sovereign industrial scale.
No layer in the current governance stack has both the intelligence and the authority to orchestrate the system that Hoogervorst correctly identifies as Europe’s strategic destination.
Thinking like a system generates the right questions. Orchestration infrastructure generates the answers. Europe currently has the former and lacks the latter. We need to go beyond Form and Flow and achieve Fusion
‘Impossible to Ignore’ Requires Fusion, Not Just Flow
Hoogervorst’s closing line — that Europe is beginning to ask how it can become impossible to ignore — is the most forward-pointing statement in the piece. It points directly, without using the language, toward what the IIBE framework calls Fusion: the stage at which ecosystem actors develop genuine collaborative intelligence, where interactions between participants generate capabilities and structural moats that no single actor could produce alone.
The control points Europe holds are Flow assets. ASML’s lithography position. SAP’s enterprise data depth. Siemens’ industrial automation capability. Each extraordinary. Each irreplaceable within its domain. Each generating significant individual competitive advantage.
But Fusion-level indispensability — the kind that makes a system impossible to ignore rather than making individual actors difficult to bypass — is generated not by the control points themselves but by what happens between them. The collaborative intelligence that emerges when ASML’s semiconductor trajectory intelligence meets Mistral’s AI development curve meets SAP’s enterprise adoption data meets Siemens’ industrial deployment intelligence.
The structural moats that emerge when those seven companies build shared infrastructure that no competing region can replicate because the architecture requires the simultaneous presence of all seven capabilities operating in genuine ecosystem connection.
That is what impossible to ignore looks like at ecosystem scale. And it requires Flow, Form, and Fusion to be sequenced deliberately — not assumed to emerge from the proximity of world-class assets on a shared continent.
“Europe is beginning to think less in terms of sectors and more in terms of systems.”
Kees Hoogervorst, Altair Media, May 2026
This is true. And it is the most hopeful observation in the entire post-CEO-letter debate. The cognitive shift is real. The strategic intent is present. The political will, demonstrated by seven leaders co-signing a single text for eight national newspapers, is genuine.
What is missing is the architectural instrument that converts systemic thinking into ecosystem structure. The diagnostic that maps precisely where the Form layer needs to be built. The governance design that makes control points compound rather than coexist. The emergence sequence that moves Europe from its current extraordinary concentration of Flow assets toward the Fusion-level competitive advantage that “impossible to ignore” actually describes.
What Comes Next in This Conversation
Kees Hoogervorst has made a genuine contribution to this debate by naming the shift from sovereignty to indispensability and introducing the control points frame. That framing will travel. It deserves to.
What I want to add — building on his analysis rather than contesting it — is the structural layer beneath it. The IIBE Nine Dimensional Diagnostic Substrate, applied in full to the EU industrial ecosystem, maps the distance between where those seven companies are now and where the control points frame points them toward. It surfaces the specific alignment gaps, governance tensions, and value flow breakdowns that separate systemic thinking from ecosystem architecture. And it identifies the breakthrough points — dimension by dimension — at which the Form layer can begin to be built.
The architectural challenge
Hoogervorst correctly names is real, specific, and addressable. Europe has everything it needs to meet it except the diagnostic instruments that makes the architecture designable and the governance structure that makes it deployable.
Europe is starting to think like a system. The next question — the one that determines whether that thinking produces structural change or remains a more sophisticated version of the same recognition without architecture — is whether the organisations that have publicly committed to systems thinking are ready to invest in the ecosystem design that systems architecture actually requires.
That investment begins with a diagnostic. Not another report. Not another forum. A structured, architectural diagnostic that maps the specific gaps between the control points Europe holds and the connective architecture that would make them compound.
That diagnostic exists. The framework that generates it exists. And the conversation Hoogervorst has opened is exactly the right place to take it forward.
This piece builds directly on Kees Hoogervorst’s “Europe Is Starting to Think Like a System,” published by Altair Media on 29 May 2026. I recommend reading his analysis alongside this one — they are in conversation, not competition.
If this IIBE framing resonates with where your organisation is navigating, I welcome a direct conversation.
Paul Hobcraft
Creator, Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) Framework
Founder, Ecosystems4Innovating | paul4innovating.com