A strong Europe needs strong companies.

Why I'm starting Augmented Ideas

I have been pawing at the sand since ChatGPT-3.5 came out. In January 2024 I started writing and pondering about the Cambrian explosion of bits and bytes. Moore’s Law and the exponential build-out of computing power, data storage, communication networks and digital platforms, now coupled with frontier AI labs and open-source models, all building on each other. The gains compound. Throw in a healthy dose of geopolitics and industrial policy and the world may genuinely be radically different twenty years from now.

I had a false start in 2024. Now is the moment to launch Augmented Ideas and actually show up. No more overthinking.

First of all, I am a Europeanist. Secondly, I am a globalist. My concern, interest and focus sit around the state and evolution of European competitiveness, and how AI innovation and industrial policy play into it, along with the external forces pressing on all of it.

When I was running roundtable sessions on digital transformation for subsidiaries of multinationals in Shanghai in the late 2010s, what struck me was the speed. Speed of execution, speed of innovation. It is well documented now. It was not then, and watching it up close changes how you read Europe when you come back.

The diagnosis on Europe is clear enough. Mario Draghi provided the blueprint in 2024. But the work it calls for runs through the Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and twenty-seven national transpositions. The single market has been formally diagnosed as incomplete, and the status today is that the problem and the direction of travel are agreed while delivery remains pending.

I would argue the coordination machinery of Europe, the part running through Brussels and twenty-seven capitals, is structurally too slow for this moment. Companies can wait for a silver bullet through the most consequential years of the decade, or they can start building themselves and between themselves, through ecosystems and communities that are iterative and imperfect and constantly moving forward.

We could take a page from the Chinese approach here. Joerg Wuttke made the point recently in an interview with AmCham China’s magazine:

When I worked at BASF, we often believed products shouldn’t leave the factory until they were 110% perfect. China teaches a different lesson: sometimes 80% is enough because speed matters. You can improve the product later. That mindset has become one of China’s biggest competitive advantages.

Companies in Europe should build more communities and ecosystems among themselves to enable this mindset. Test ideas, try new ventures, combine to offer capabilities none of them could fund alone. Especially now, when AI is going to widen the gap between the fast and the legacy incumbents who align everything before they move.

Two different things, and worth separating. Community building is the exchange between people to align or challenge and validate ideas. Ecosystems are when the talking stops and the services start getting rendered and the partnerships get formed.

That is the work I know how to do. Twenty years of building executive communities across Asia and Europe. And I should say it plainly: I am a relationship person. I like networking. I like sitting in a room with people who see the same problem from four incompatible angles. That is not a soft skill alongside the real job. It is the job. Augmented Ideas is where I work on it out loud.

Jacques Delors told the European Parliament that Europe’s diversity makes it prodigiously rich, and that the diversity must be preserved so it can bear fruit for the common good.

Draghi opens his 2024 report by naming Europe’s fundamental values as prosperity, equity, freedom, peace and democracy in a sustainable environment, and says that if Europe can no longer provide them to its people, or has to trade one off against another, it will have lost its reason for being.

A strong Europe needs strong companies. My North Star is doing my little bit to help companies accelerate innovation and transformation in Europe. It is a big, audacious goal. I have got about twenty years left to work, so I had better make the most of it.

So here is what you can expect with Augmented Ideas. Regular articles, not too long. The recurring commentary is focused on European mid-caps, SMEs and start-ups. Personal experiences on building communities and business development. Commentary on China, double-clicks on defence and security industrial capacity, and country-level snapshots. Running through all of it: AI acceleration, geopolitical realignment, and the sustainability transition. That's quite a lot indeed, yes. The topic is European competitiveness, which means everything that detracts from or elevates it.

It's a wide-angle newsletter, and I will be iterating as I go along. The test I apply to every piece is whether it helps someone running a European business make a better decision. In the same spirit, this is far from perfect, and I'm not going to wait until it leaves the factory gate. I will also carry on talking to executives on a regular basis. I do not pretend to have the answers. This is a thinking pad, somewhere to start unpacking the problems and identifying the solutions.