On November 30, 2020, Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, gave the annual Elsevier Weekblad (EW) Economics Lecture in the historic Felix Meritis building in Amsterdam. In his lecture, entitled Together we’ll innovate the Netherlands, Van Houten explored the competitive strength of the Netherlands and detailed his vision for securing a prosperous future for the country. According to Van Houten, the road to that goal revolves around targeted investment in promising growth areas that can flourish in five or six defined innovation ecosystems, supported by an efficiently functioning Netherlands and a united Europe.
Because of the corona crisis, Van Houten addressed most of his audience online - and with that in mind he opened his lecture by saying, “We live in far from normal times. But the crisis has also taught us something beautiful: that if necessary, we in the Netherlands can change quickly.” It was the introduction to a lecture in which his plea to the audience was to continuously embrace change, or to use his own metaphor ‘to seek out the wind and sail new seas’.
Van Houten concluded by saying that the Netherlands must take action. The plan may be beautiful, but now all parties must implement it. And for that they need to be prepared to proactively change, not simply because they are forced to. Based on the ‘Namens Nederland’ (‘On behalf of the Netherlands’) survey, one of the early initiatives of the NL2025 movement that Van Houten helps to spearhead, he concluded that the will is there. He therefore ended his optimistic EW Economics Lecture 2020 with an enthusiastic appeal to all parties – the government, entrepreneurs, investors, thinkers and doers – to embrace the motto ‘Together we will succeed’ in the firm belief that doing so would lead to a prosperous future for the Netherlands.
The full text of the lecture, is available in English and Dutch.