ConneCt 2025

The impact of technology towards 2025 is the subtitle of a study just presented by the branche society Uneto-VNI in cooperation with over 150 stakeholders.
The result: a document which describes a number of innovation themes that should stimulate cooperation among competitors and the flexibility to work across sectors as well. The central themes are:

• Urbanisation in the Netherlands
• Zero emission
• (Big) Data as a commodity
• Sectors without boundaries
• Human Capital
• New ways of working.

What's the need to have such a report? To answer this question you have to dive into the themes and challenges a head of us. What people realised that since the peak of the 2008 crisis and beyond, things look differently nowadays. business is tough, old models do not guarantee profitable and sustainable businesses anymore. The market is asking for solutions instead of standard products and systems. A Paradigm shift is happening, which requires to think about how to innovate, in order to get ready for the near future.

This does remind me of a viewpoint presented by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) five years ago. They analysed the competitiveness of the Netherlands in 2012. They concluded that the location of international businesses in the Netherlands (including their head offices) was actually driving our wealth. The fact that a hairdresser in the Netherlands earns 20 times the income of one in e.g. Chili, is because price levels are set by the buying power of employees that work in those internationally competing companies, and earn "global" based salaries. If a country looses its global competitiveness, it will also lose its ability to create economic growth. ​​

The basic drivers are advantages in infrastructure, education, geography, demography and in case of the Netherlands the availability of cheap energy (natural gas).  But what we have seen is that other countries have closed the gap and the advantages disappeared quickly. So the time has come that we have to reinvent ourselves, which happens in various areas. Technological innovation is a strong driver for growth, it always has been.  Although the global competitiveness has weakened, their are potential assets to be developed within companies that currently play in the mid-market arena.

The exciting thing about Connect 2025 is that a collective awareness is growing that the Netherlands can get into the lead by addressing societal challenges with solutions driven by technological innovation and cooperation. If this paradigm shift is settling in, it will be marked as the start of a bright future.


sources:
www.connect2025.nl;
NL2030 Contouren van een nieuw Nederlands verdienmodel, BCG 2012.