This week, we read Rapport Wennink, and it left us with an uncomfortable but useful thought: prosperity is not something you inherit. It is something you keep re-earning.
De route naar toekomstige welvaart was written in 2025 by Peter Wennink, the former CEO of ASML, as the Dutch answer to the Draghi report on European competitiveness. It looks at four domains that will decide the country's future: digitalisation and AI, life sciences and biotech, security and resilience, and energy and climate technology.
The arithmetic, not the mood
The heart of the report is not a mood. It is arithmetic. Keeping our healthcare, our pensions and our public services at the level we are used to requires economic growth well above what the current forecasts project. That gap between what we need and what we are on track for does not close by itself. Wennink's answer is targeted investment in productivity and technology, and, just as importantly, the recognition that no single party can carry it. Not the government alone, not business alone.
It asks for something the country last managed decades ago: a shared effort with a shared direction.
The hard part
"We will do it together" is the easiest line in any strategy. It is also where most transitions quietly stall, because together usually has no owner.
Everyone agrees, and nobody moves. Wennink knows this. The report is precise about where coordination fails — not in the ambition, but in the handoff. Who decides when priorities conflict? Who takes responsibility for the gap between the policy document and the quarterly result? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the actual bottlenecks.
What it means for the people already working
For a room full of young professionals, one implication of the report stands out. The generation that will live with the gap is already working. In Wennink's reading this is not a problem to inherit in twenty years, but one to act on now. Prosperity handed down is not the same as prosperity re-earned.
That is the spirit the festival opens with. The first thing on the main stage is a panel called "Transitions We Can't Afford to Delay" — a title that echoes the report's own diagnosis: the delay is not a lack of ideas, but systems that move too slowly to act on them.
What are you doing, in your own work, that a version of this region ten years from now will be glad you started?