Author Archives: Bob Gravestijn

Royal Philips: Metaphor or operating logic?

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Infographic showing Philips’ strategic fork with two paths: Tier 1 ecosystem orchestrator with neutral governance, open platforms and strategic optionality, and Tier 2 subordinate contributor with a company‑centred network, control trap and subordinate trajectory.
Philips must choose between staying a company‑centred contributor or becoming a true ecosystem orchestrator, using neutral governance and open platforms to unlock innovation at system scale.

Roy Jakobs has been saying the right words for a while now. At Davos in January 2026, freshly reappointed as Philips CEO, he called for an “open ecosystem” in which Philips adopts other companies’ AI into its workflows rather than trying to build everything itself. By March, he was describing Philips’ shift from standalone devices toward integrated AI platforms, while also warning that slower growth leaves less room to keep investing in innovation. Then in July, alongside the Dutch government’s €102.5 million MedTech commitment, he returned to the same theme: “innovation thrives when we come together around a shared ambition”.

That is not random messaging. It is a CEO describing something close to an orchestrator strategy. The question is whether Philips’ actual architecture matches what its CEO is now saying in public.

A simple test helps. If Philips disappeared from HealthSuite tomorrow, would the hospitals, AI vendors, and researchers connected to it keep building together on their own? Or would the whole thing simply stop? If the honest answer is “it would stop,” then Philips does not yet have an ecosystem in the full sense. It has a company-centred network using ecosystem language. That distinction – metaphor versus operating logic – is the most useful lens for reading Philips’ current strategic fork.

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Germany’s industrial memory loss: Why an engineering engine is losing the ecosystem play

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Germany’s Industrial Memory Loss

Germany may be about to do something few believed possible: lose not just industrial output, but the industrial memory that made it Europe’s most admired manufacturing power. Since the pandemic, the country has lost nearly a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs, industrial production has fallen every year since 2022, and more than 31 per cent of industrial firms now say they are less competitive globally. Paul Hobcraft’s Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) offers a sharp way to read this. It helps explain how a country can still have world-class firms, skills and institutions, yet begin to lose the architecture that allows them to learn, align and adapt together.

Some will argue that Germany is simply going through the same shift every mature economy faces. Lower-value production moves elsewhere; higher-value engineering, design and coordination stay at home. In that reading, Germany is not declining. It is upgrading.

It is a neat story. It is also too easy.

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Siemens is succeeding. That is exactly when governance gets dangerous.

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Recognizing the growing reality

The hardest ceilings are the ones you approach while everything around you still looks like progress.

Siemens has built something real. Real industrial reach. Real data gravity. Real presence across manufacturing, energy, mobility and healthcare. The most credible industrial ecosystem of its generation – built over decades, not months, on relationships and infrastructure that competitors cannot simply replicate.

And yet.

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Northvolt: When ecosystem ambition outruns your room to move

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When the road to sovereign capacity leaves you with nowhere left to turn.

Northvolt didn’t just run out of money. It ran out of ways to change direction.

For a few years, Northvolt carried far more than a balance sheet. It carried Europe’s story about itself: that the continent could still build strategic industries, secure its own energy future, and turn circularity from a slide into a system. Then, in less than two years, that story went from European flagship to bankruptcy proceedings and asset sales. The mission didn’t suddenly become wrong. The architecture ran out of room to move when the future stopped cooperating.

This is not a post about Northvolt’s management. It is an article about what happens when ecosystem ambition scales faster than the operating system needed to keep it coherent – especially when optionality and volatility stop being theoretical and start showing up in the numbers. In plain terms, that is just how much room to move your design still leaves you, and how quickly the world forces you to use it. Looked at through that lens, Northvolt is a textbook case of ecosystem entrapment: a design that gradually traded away future freedom for speed and scale.

When the story still worked

On paper, Northvolt did many of the “right” things.

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