Wennink: Society craves urgency, politics keeps looking inward

Former ASML chief Peter Wennink took the stage at Eindhoven’s LEVEL UP event with an urgent message for founders, investors, and policymakers alike: Europe must drop its complacency, build deep industry-informed risk capital, and protect the freedom to fail.

A few years ago, not far from the stage at Eindhoven’s LEVEL UP event, Peter Wennink famously described the Netherlands as “fat, dumb, and happy.” Addressing a packed room of founders and tech leaders early in the day, the former ASML CEO offered a candid update: “To a certain extent, we are still fat and dumb, but not that happy anymore.”

The root of that unease, Wennink explained, lies in a glaring gap between Europe and the rest of the world. Across global trips examining the four macro pillars of the future - digital, life sciences, energy/climate, and security - he witnessed governments and industries aggressively aligning to capture value. Returning home, he ran smack into Dutch complacency.

Peter Wennink at LEVEL UP 2026, © Bram Saeys

“Like it’s always been this way, it will stay this way,” Wennink warned. “Trust me, it will not. If we don’t participate in this next huge wave of value generation, our children and grandchildren will find themselves in a very different space. While we still have a huge bank account as a society with thousands of billions of euros, we are a very attractive customer, with nothing to offer.”

The first 30 seconds: Where is the customer?

Wennink emphasized that value creation will not originate within slow-moving corporate giants. “Most innovation ideas don’t start with major multinationals. They’re too organized to be really disruptive.” Yet, disruptive ideas are worthless in a vacuum. When asked what advice he has for the startup founders pitching and networking at LEVEL UP, Wennink stressed customer centricity: "When they start to talk about the product, I always listen very carefully. In the first 30 seconds, I want to also hear the word ‘customer.’ What are you trying to solve? How do you know that constitutes value?”

Large corporates often know their strategic direction, but "they don't know what they don't know," Wennink pointed out. For startups, the key is to engage early, ask questions, and validate value inside the ecosystem. When asked how an emerging technology practically makes its way into a giant like ASML, Wennink pointed straight to ecosystem trust and laser focus: “ASML is a system architect and completely dependent on the ecosystem around it,” Wennink said. “You have to have a laser-sharp focus on where you think you can create value, and you have to confirm that in your ecosystem... It’s all about fairly sharing the risks and rewards of what you try to do together. If you don't have that laser-sharp focus, they will not follow.”

Europe’s real problem: A lack of ‘informed risk’

Fielding questions on Europe’s chronic funding gap and Mario Draghi's recent competitiveness warnings, Wennink pushed back on the idea that the problem is simply a lack of cash or post-2008 fiscal conservatism. While welcoming the launch of the Dutch National Financing Institution to blend public and private capital for scale-ups, he argued that Europe’s deepest flaw is cultural and structural: “We lack the right level of informed risk-taking here,” Wennink asserted.

In Europe, capital is heavily locked inside pension funds and institutional investors who lack deep sector-level understanding of complex systems like semiconductors, photonics, and biotech. “In the US, it’s simple: the capital market creates the innovation. The capital market, especially venture capital and private equity, is made up of investors who have run those businesses, created those businesses, and have the in-depth knowledge to take that informed risk... They do due diligence and conclude: ‘It’s more likely than not that this is going to work,’ and then they go. Here, we need to learn how to level up very quickly our know-how on how we need to take informed risks.”

Corporate governance and the danger of ‘cancel culture’

When asked how scaling companies can introduce governance without stifling creativity, Wennink issued a sharp critique of modern risk aversion and current corporate governance structures. “Innovation is the process of very fast re-iterations of what you’re trying to do together... and the success of innovation is all about the speed with which you can change,” Wennink stated. Having led an organization of 45,000 employees, he warned that rigid bureaucracy and a punitive culture can kill progress.

Above all, leadership must safeguard psychological safety: “For companies, the most important thing you need to cherish is the freedom and the safety to speak up, to really assess that what's wrong is wrong. And that it is okay to make mistakes while you're trying to innovate, and that you course-correct... When you make a mistake today, you will be canceled. And if you know you’re going to be canceled, you will paralyze. And the last thing you need when you want to innovate is paralysis.”

A wake-up call for The Hague

Since releasing his report, Wennink's schedule has been overwhelmed with speaking requests from Brussels to boardrooms, "averaging two to three invitations a day". The broader public and industry, he notes, are hungry for direction.

The only entity lagging behind? Politics. “The request out of society and people is so high; that sense of urgency and guidance is so obvious throughout society, except in politics,” Wennink concluded. “The Hague is interested in The Hague. It should be interested in us. Not ‘what’s in it for me,’ but ‘what’s in it for us, and what can I contribute?’ Hopefully, more kicks in the butt will get them there. At least I will keep delivering them.”