Last week,
Susanne
and I looked at how the semiconductor industry
as a whole dealt with the collective uncertainty surrounding The
Decision of the Century for the Next Generation of Lithography
(NGL). This week, we zoom in on that same decision, but this time
from Veldhoven.
M. C. Escher's Three Spheres II (1946) shows three
spheres resting on a table. They appear identical, yet each
reflects its surroundings differently, one mirrors the room,
another is transparent, the third matte. We chose this image
because it reflects what ASML faced in the late 1990s: three
technological options, EUV, e-beam, and ion-beam, formally equal
on the table, yet each reflecting a fundamentally different
future.
M.C. Escher (1946), Three Spheres II
One Product, One Business Line
To understand why this choice carried such weight for ASML, it
helps to understand how the company was structured at the time. In
the late 1990s, ASML was a young publicly listed company with
essentially one product family and one business line: lithography
machines. From a business perspective, that was unusual.
Conventional wisdom favored diversification, related or unrelated,
as a way to spread risk and protect shareholder value. ASML did
the opposite, because the complexity of its technology demanded
almost monomaniacal focus.
We return in Blog 8 and Chapter 2 to how that focus historically
emerged. For now, what matters is what that focus implied for the
NGL decision: there was no second pillar to fall back on. If ASML
backed the wrong technology, there was no other part of the
business capable of absorbing that mistake.
Looking Through Two Lenses Simultaneously
The chapter describes how ASML approached this choice through two
complementary theoretical lenses.
The first is real options reasoning: behave like a trader in stock
options. Buy time by making small commitments across multiple
alternatives. Scale up only when both technological and economic
evidence indicate that you are moving in the right direction.
The second perspective is scientific reasoning: treat every option
as a hypothesis, make the critical assumptions explicit, and allow
negative results to close off weaker paths.
Individually, both lenses fall short. Buying options alone leads
to delay without necessarily generating new evidence.
Experimentation alone can become expensive and directionless.
Combined, however, they reinforce one another: experiments
generate the information options require, while options logic
determines how deeply to commit to each experiment.
Bringing the Question In-House
One important element explored in Chapter 5, whose implications
may not be immediately visible to everyone, is a management
decision made in 1995. The decision expressed the ambition to
internalize both IP registration and the development of an
in-house research department. Until then, ASML had relied on
Philips NatLab for fundamental research. But an internal research
department was expected to answer the NGL question itself.
The rationale behind that shift was later summarized by the head
of the department, Jos Benschop:
"Do not outsource this question. You can outsource the
activities, but not how do I give an answer to the question. What
will happen after optical lithography?"
The underlying message was clear: activities can be outsourced,
but the foundation of such a strategic question belongs inside the
organization, where the consequences of the answer ultimately
fall. That decision made much of what followed in the chapter
possible. ASML established separate experiments for each
technology considered serious, always in environments where the
strongest expertise was available. There was no early commitment
to EUV; the portfolio deliberately remained broad for years, and
only when evidence accumulated did the center of gravity gradually
shift in that direction. The chapter describes in detail how these
experiments were structured and which dynamics unfolded within
them.
The Same Logic, a Different Outcome
During the same period, Canon Inc. and Nikon applied similar
reasoning. Both developed portfolios of NGL explorations: Canon
through X-ray lithography, nanoimprint from 2001 onward, and EUV
through the Japanese EUVA consortium; Nikon through e-beam, EUV,
and the continued development of optical lithography. Contrary to
what is sometimes assumed, neither company was passive during this
period.
When the financial crisis of 2008 arrived and the costs of EUV
continued to rise, both companies decided to terminate their EUV
programs. ASML's former chief scientist Bill Arnold recalled this
matter-of-factly:
"Nikon and Canon as well, they both had EUV programs at one time
and actually said we can't afford it."
The more interesting question is why the same options logic
produced different outcomes. Part of the answer lies in the firms'
structures themselves. At Canon, for example, lithography
accounted for less than 10% of total revenue; there was a broader
portfolio to fall back on. A diversified company withdrawing from
an expensive technological race makes a reasonable decision within
its own logic. A highly focused company making the same decision
may no longer exist afterward.
Next week: Blog 8 turns to Chapter 2, forty years of ASML in five
acts, including the historical roots of that one-product focus.
Last week, we focused on four audiences: managers in innovative
environments, deep-tech founders, executives of large
organizations, and policymakers, and asked what the patterns
described in this book might mean for each of them. Despite the
discomfort of the limited generalizability of context-specific
patterns,
Susanne
and I still attempted to build that bridge. We
are now past the halfway point and counting down to the
publication date. The coming blogs will move closer to the
substance of ASML itself. We begin, however, at the meta level:
with the semiconductor industry as a whole.
M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands (1948) shows two hands
drawing each other. Neither exists without the other. We chose
this image because it captures what was at play in the
semiconductor industry of the late 1990s: a situation in which
chipmakers, equipment manufacturers, material suppliers, and
research institutions could not independently solve the central
challenge of that period. The problem was too large for any single
player to make meaningful progress alone.
M.C. Escher (1948), Drawing Hands
Collective Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a familiar theme in the literature on strategy and
innovation. But there is a difference between a firm navigating
its own uncertainty and an industry collectively not knowing which
direction to take. In the latter case, not only does the dominant
technology shift, but the entire framework through which the
market is defined becomes unstable. What good enough means is
contested, as is who has the authority to define it.
That was the situation in the semiconductor industry at the end
of the twentieth century. The existing technology of optical
lithography seemed to be approaching its physical limits. The
urgency to find a successor technology was high, yet it was clear
that this would require a collective choice. Any candidate
technology would only succeed if the entire value chain could move
along with it: light sources, masks, materials, and production
equipment all needed to evolve in parallel. Each link had to
develop simultaneously, and no single party could finance or
validate this on its own.
"What 'good enough' means is contested - as is who has the
authority to define it."
The Decision of the Century
Within the industry, this was referred to as The Decision of the
Century. There was significant time pressure: if possible, the
choice of a new technology had to be made before the end of the
twentieth century. The investments required to bring any candidate
technology to production readiness were so substantial in the late
1990s that the industry could not afford to fully pursue multiple
paths in parallel. Only one could ultimately prevail, and the
entire supply chain, masks, materials, and metrology equipment,
needed to align behind that choice.
What emerged was a structured collective process. Every six
months, the champions of all candidate technologies convened. In
the audience were around one hundred experts: chipmakers,
equipment manufacturers, and materials specialists. The different
technology consortia presented their progress to the same room,
and at the end, a vote was taken on which technology appeared
most viable. Those unable to demonstrate sufficient progress lost
votes, attention, and funding. Early voting outcomes moved in a
direction that almost no one had anticipated. In the chapter, we
describe in detail how this process unfolded.
Politics in Its Essential Sense
Participants described this process as technology-driven. And
indeed, the mechanisms were designed as such: comparability,
transparency, discipline, and consortia focused on technological
experimentation. But those who read this chapter may also
recognize something else: the collective and interpersonal
dimension of decision-making.
Hannah Arendt described politics not as governance or lobbying,
but as the space that emerges when people speak and act together:
a shared arena in which individuals appear as distinct actors,
exchange arguments, and initiate something new. Power, in her
sense, is not possessed by individuals; it arises between people
who act together, and exists only as long as that collective
action continues. The binding force of a collective decision, in
this view, does not derive from technical correctness, but from
the fact that people have acted together within that space.
"The binding force of a collective decision does not derive from
technical correctness, but from the fact that people have acted
together within that space."
SEMATECH created precisely such a space. The shared roadmap it
developed and used as a collective guide derived its authority not
primarily from representing the technically correct path, but from
having been shaped collectively by the industry. It emerged in an
arena where no single participant, regardless of size or power,
could fully control the outcome. Socio-economic interests,
geopolitical context, and questions of legitimacy all played a
role alongside technical considerations.
Next week: we zoom in on ASML itself, how the company navigated
that same decision as an individual actor, with its own
technological portfolio and trade-offs.
For this blog,
Susanne
and I chose M. C. Escher's
Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935). He holds up a
reflective sphere and sees himself: the room, the windows, his own
face at the center. What you see depends on where you stand. That
is also the premise of Chapter 9: we reverse the analytical lens -
from ASML to the reader.
For eight chapters, the book has focused on one company: forty
years of choices made under conditions that no one fully
understood at the time. The imprints formed in the early years
continued to shape decision-making long after they were
consciously recognized. Ecosystems emerged through a specific
combination of necessity, institutional legacy, and timing that
cannot be engineered. And strategic options were explored step by
step, refined over time, and, when evidence pointed in a
direction, deepened or abandoned.
M.C. Escher (1935), Hand with Reflecting Sphere
Prompting Dialogue Rather Than Prescribing Answers
In Chapter 9, we take a different approach. We step away from
ASML and carefully connect this material to the reader's context.
Writing this chapter came with hesitation. Throughout the book, we
have aimed to offer observations and questions rather than impose
conclusions: no step-by-step plans, no concrete tips, no synthesis
that replaces the reader's own thinking. We know the context of
ASML, but not that of the reader. And we are acutely aware of how
context-specific strategic decision-making is: what worked in
Veldhoven worked there, under those conditions, with those people,
in that specific sequence of events. As Gjalt Smit notes in the
opening pages of the book: this is not a recipe that can simply be
copied.
"Gjalt Smit already says it in the opening pages of the book:
this is not a recipe that can simply be copied."
At the same time, avoiding any attempt to build a bridge to other
contexts also feels insufficient, a way of stepping aside rather
than enabling broader impact and dialogue. If the lenses we
applied across eight chapters do not connect beyond ASML, why read
them at all? This becomes even more relevant as we increasingly
shift attention from the main title Lessons Learned from
ASML to the subtitle Building and Sustaining
Innovativeness under Uncertainty, a topic that is
particularly timely in the Dutch context. It also resonates with
the current role of Peter Wennink, who now applies lessons from
ASML to the broader economy and calls for decisive innovation and
investment in uncertain times.
Four Audiences, One Story
In an effort to build that bridge, we wrote this chapter with four
audiences in mind: managers in innovative environments, founders
and CEOs of deep-tech start-ups and scale-ups, executives of
established organizations, and policymakers, each with their own
time horizons, degrees of freedom, and blind spots. We link each
group to the theoretical lenses we consider most relevant to their
perspective, without claiming exclusivity.
For managers, the question is how to design an organization in
which unexpected insights have a chance to take root. While
keeping all balls in the air today, you must also create space for
what comes next, fully aware of how rarely those ambitions coexist
without tension. In such a context, how do you build the
conditions for serendipity, rather than missing it because the
agenda is full? And how do you develop routines that allow new
opportunities to move beyond the initial phase and become part of
the organization's collective capability? Within that space, how
do you ensure clarity in choices, roles, interfaces, and the
smooth flow of knowledge and new insights?
We then turn to founders and CEOs of deep-tech companies,
operating in a world where development cycles are typically longer
and riskier than the patience and risk appetite of investors.
Here, we examine strategic options and the scientific approach:
how to stay engaged with multiple possible futures without
assuming the outcome. ASML's long-term investments in parallel
technological trajectories, DUV and EUV side by side, are
informative, but also potentially misleading: they suggest a level
of patience and scale that most founders do not have. For that
reason, the chapter focuses on the underlying mechanisms that also
work at smaller scales.
We then look at the challenge faced by executives in established
organizations: how to make an organization with a rich past
resilient in a turbulent future. This involves not only managing
strategy, KPIs, and market expectations, but also an inherited set
of organizational reflexes, some still valuable, others
experienced as ballast. For them, we explore the role of imprints
and sensitive periods: how to make deeply embedded patterns
visible and assess whether they still serve their original
purpose. And how to use moments of turbulence to deliberately
steer the organization's DNA in a more adaptive direction.
Finally, we turn to policymakers working on innovation and
industrial policy. This is the most politically charged part of
the book, written in the autumn of 2025 in the Netherlands, at a
time when terms such as strategic autonomy and technological
sovereignty dominate public debate. The chapter takes that urgency
seriously and poses a sharp question:
"Peter Wennink has often warned against the dream of becoming a
chokepoint in a supply chain as an end in itself. In his view, it
is healthier to aim for mutual dependencies: being important
enough that others have a stake in your success, but not so
dominant that you turn into a permanent geopolitical pressure
point."
We therefore explore collective action and the geopolitical
dimension of high-tech development: what the semiconductor
industry reveals about organizing shared uncertainty without
undermining competitiveness. And how technological complexity
creates a fine-grained web of interdependencies across global
value chains, while local historical context continues to shape
where regions can truly excel.
What the Chapter Aims to Do
The ambition of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is to
make patterns recognizable rather than prescribe a path. To raise
questions that help the reader move forward from their own
position, rather than from ours.
"If something here matched an intuition you already had, perhaps
it simply gave it a name. Recognition can be enough for momentum
to form: a shared word, a clearer connection, a decision taken at
the right level."
Whether we succeeded, we will only know when readers tell us.
Next week: collective action to jointly build the individual
competitiveness of the future, on the dynamics of innovation
ecosystems.
April 16, 2026
Three Worlds - Our Own Perspective on Sustainable Innovativeness
Blog 4 of 10 | On the Eighth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
The Escher print we selected for this chapter is
Three Worlds (1955). Three layers are visible
simultaneously on the same water surface: fallen leaves floating,
bare trees reflected, and deep below, a fish that appears both in
the foreground and the background at once. Each of these layers
follows its own logic, yet together they express something none of
them can convey individually. It felt like a fitting image for the
chapter that demanded the most from us to write.
In the seven chapters before this, Susanne and I could
comfortably stay behind empirical data, theory, or a combination
of both. Here, that is no longer possible. This chapter is
personal: two people who, after years of research and practice,
offer their own take-away or modest perspective, fully aware that
entire libraries exist on the themes we touch upon. Whether it
succeeds is left to the reader.
M.C. Escher's Three Worlds (1955), different
perspectives that together form a system, each with its own logic.
Why We Did It Anyway
We do not know how many management books we will write in our
lives. It is quite possible that this, alongside all our other
activities, will be our most ambitious one, simply because
spending another fifteen years on something similar seems
unlikely. With that realization came a conviction: if you tell
this story, and you also have something to say about how you
think, then this is the moment. Opportunities like this rarely
come twice.
So yes, the combination of perspectives in this chapter is truly
our own construct. That makes it all the more exciting to share,
especially because we try to do so as fully and concisely as
possible, while each perspective contains an entire world behind
it. The spectrum we cover is broad: from the highly rational and
systematic to the almost intangible. This is intentional because
innovation under uncertainty requires both, even if they are
difficult to articulate simultaneously.
The motivation behind this chapter extends beyond ASML. We would
like to see more organizations develop the decisiveness and
learning capacity that ASML has built. At the same time, we see
that the reality in many organizations is far removed from how
ASML operates. Embedding such innovative capacity more deeply
begins with an integrated view of the organization itself: the
futures it envisions, the assumptions underlying those futures,
and what is actually required to realize them. We wrote this as
an invitation to examine one's own situation through multiple
lenses at once, without resorting to ready-made formulas.
Two Perspectives, One Question
The question that occupies both of us is how to formulate a
strategy that provides direction yet remains adaptable in an
uncertain context, and how to translate that into practice in
organizations made up of real people, each with their own views,
fears, interests, commitments, and insights. How do you create
something that works at the level of the organization, the groups
within it, and the individual?
One perspective approaches this question through three
instruments, applied as an integrated learning cycle: scenario
planning to keep multiple plausible futures alive,
Discovery-Driven Planning to make underlying assumptions explicit
and testable, and scientific experimentation to actively test
those assumptions while uncertainty is still unresolved. Together,
they describe a way of working he calls disciplined readiness:
preparing, screening futures, and delaying commitment until a
choice becomes necessary and confidence has grown sufficiently to
make it.
"It is simple; you eat an elephant in small pieces. So there was
a program which always had a horizon of a couple of years ahead.
And then there was a deliverable or an intended deliverable that
never came because we found a hurdle that we could not jump. And
then you have a new two-year program ahead."
- Erik Loopstra, ASML Fellow
That pattern, defining possible horizons, testing them, hitting a
wall, and starting again, is what innovative strategy looks like
in practice. Far less linear than it appears in a book, as we
know all too well.
Susanne's perspective starts from a different but related
question: how does strategic intent travel through an
organization? How do you anchor a sound plan in a complex
reality? She works with three intertwined layers, each with its
own systemic perspective.
The systems engineering layer asks what the whole must deliver,
how to structure it, and where the explicit trade-offs lie. The
systems dynamics layer asks which flows and feedback loops
determine whether the organization responds to change in a
learning-oriented way, and how intended loops relate to everyday
behavior. And then there is the systemic layer of the human
undercurrent: the less visible domain of connection, order, and
balance, the fears, loyalties, and status dynamics that can
reinforce or quietly undermine formal structures.
That third layer is often considered soft, yet it is precisely
what explains why two organizations with very similar strategies
and structures can perform so differently. You may choose not to
devote time and attention to it, but it develops regardless and
affects an organization's capacity and innovativeness.
"The hope is simple: that these pages help bring strategy,
scenarios, structure, flows, and undercurrents into the same
line, so that innovativeness travels beyond pitches, post-its,
pilots, and PowerPoint and into how work is done."
That is the promise this chapter seeks to deliver, fully aware
that it may come across as complex. Sustainable innovativeness
only emerges when it becomes an integral part of the organization,
and its development therefore requires a systematic approach. With
this chapter, we aim to offer a clearer view of how that bridges
strategic ambition and organizational reality.
Next week: What does all of this actually mean if you are the one
making the decisions?
April 8, 2026
Belvedere - The Patterns You Only See When You Rise Above the Story
Blog 3 of 10 | On the Seventh Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
ASML is an exceptionally specific company. The technology, the
sector, the scale, the geopolitical position - few industries in
the world lend themselves to easy comparison. And yet, we are
writing a book that aims to offer lessons that extend beyond
Veldhoven. How do you do that without losing specificity, or
diluting the insights into platitudes?
That is the question this chapter addresses directly. Our
approach is to zoom out - to move one level higher and survey the
terrain before making claims about what can be learned.
The Escher print for this blog is Belvedere (1958). A
figure climbs to the upper gallery of an architecturally
impossible building to overlook the landscape. At each level, the
construction holds; only the whole refuses to make sense.
How do you learn from such a story? By stepping above the story
itself, making visible patterns that remain hidden at ground
level, while staying explicit about the limits of what can be seen
from any given vantage point. Every theoretical lens has its value
- but combining too many risks obscuring rather than clarifying.
M.C. Escher's Belvedere (1958), a more far-reaching
perspective from a higher vantage point.
The Danger of Looking Back
Martin van den Brink, former CTO and Co-President of ASML, puts it
bluntly:
"What we said to have as a strategy in the first ten years is that
we are going to be light... At the time, it was no strategy at
all; you had no money and no capability. So the only thing we
could do was to go to suppliers... There is a completely different
dynamic in a time in which you developed a strategy than when you
start looking back."
This is precisely the pitfall the chapter seeks to avoid.
Retrospective accounts of success tend to produce coherent
narratives. But the patterns that truly mattered rarely resemble
the patterns that, in hindsight, appear deliberately chosen.
Theoretical lenses help make underlying mechanisms visible - not
to construct better stories about the past, but to understand
which structures are transferable beyond ASML, and where that
transfer breaks down. That is the objective of this chapter: not
to retell the story, but to surface the mechanisms beneath it and
specify the conditions under which they apply elsewhere.
Multiple Axes, Simultaneously
The chapter approaches the ASML story along multiple axes. No
single perspective captures the whole; each highlights a
different dimension.
One axis runs from the individual to the ecosystem. Some patterns
are visible at the organizational level - how early choices about
structure and supplier relationships persist over decades, how
crises are converted into learning moments. Others only emerge
when zooming out: how industries organize shared uncertainty, and
how competitors collaborate to stabilize the playing field without
relinquishing strategic autonomy. These levels are interdependent
- what an organization can do depends on what the ecosystem
allows, and vice versa.
A second axis runs from past to future. Early choices leave
imprints that extend beyond deliberate strategy and are difficult
to reverse. Yet moments of revision do occur - typically during
crises, technological discontinuities, or leadership transitions.
These are sensitive periods, when what once appeared fixed becomes
temporarily fluid. Understanding the past is therefore not a
historical exercise, but a strategic capability for shaping the
future.
A third axis concerns uncertainty itself. There is the fog of
technological ferment - when multiple paths appear plausible and
established decision anchors lose their grip. There is the
uncertainty of interdependence. And there is the uncertainty of
chance, discussed in the previous blog. Each requires a different
response; conflating them is costly.
Finally, there is the relationship between change and stability.
How do you incorporate evolving insight while maintaining a
direction that remains actionable? The chapter does not offer a
formula, but it does offer a way of seeing - and that distinction
matters.
A Picture Says More Than 1,000 Words
"The value lies in what a good lens always offers: a way of seeing
that can be tested, adapted, or set aside with reasons."
This is the chapter with the figures. Conceptual models that
condense patterns that would otherwise require pages of prose. No
self-respecting management book avoids presenting an
all-explaining matrix - so we have included one as well.
At the same time, the figures provide structure for each
theoretical lens: which elements matter, and how they relate. The
lenses are related, but combining too many at once blurs the view
and makes it harder to identify what is essential.
You will find these figures in the book - where they can be read
in the context of the narrative that precedes them.
What Can Be Carried Over?
Returning to the initial question: how do you learn from a story
that resists comparison? Looking only for similarities is
insufficient. More productive is to isolate mechanisms that
operate beyond the specific context - and to clearly define where
analogy no longer holds.
"The ASML story functions as a magnifying glass, not a mirror."
It does not show what your organization looks like; it clarifies
which questions are worth asking. From the Belvedere, you see
further.
Next week: a look into the chapter we found most challenging to
write - on strategy, systems, and the things that can only be
sensed.
April 1, 2026
Relativity - On the Role of Chance, Where You Start, and Who You Meet Along the Way
Blog 2 of 10 | On the Sixth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
Last week, we concluded that ASML's trajectory can be well
explained in hindsight, but its success was not as inevitable as
we might now assume. That gap between explanatory logic and the
reality of how things actually unfolded is what this chapter
explores further. Where many management books explain how good
management and leadership contribute to organizational success,
here we explain success through factors that lie largely outside
ASML's sphere of influence.
The Escher print we selected for this blog is Relativity
(1953). Figures move through the same architecture, but each
within their own gravitational field. They cross the same
staircases, pass the same arches, yet perceive the space entirely
differently. Who you are and where you start determine which route
you see, but they also determine who you encounter, what
coincides, and which connections emerge that no one had
anticipated. This image fits the questions we raise in this
chapter.
"Who you are and where you start determine which route you see;
but it also determines who you encounter, what happens to
coincide, and which connections emerge that no one had
anticipated."
The Unpublished Manuscript of Chance and Necessity
Gjalt Smit, ASML's first CEO, wrote a manuscript after his tenure
about the early years of the company that was never published. He
titled it Chance and Necessity, after the work of
biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod. Monod argued that
random, unplanned events lie at the basis of every breakthrough,
and that necessity - the structured response to those events -
turns them into something enduring. Smit recognized that pattern
in what he himself had experienced. The major unexpected turns in
ASML's early years he described as "acts of God." Not to
downplay his own role, but because he knew that several of the
major plot twists lay far outside his sphere of influence.
The role of chance, luck, and serendipity is increasingly taken
seriously in the management literature as an explanatory factor
for strategic success, although practice, as usual, has been ahead
of theory for much longer. The tendency to retrospectively
construct a strategy that neatly explains why something worked
remains persistent. Anyone who looks closely at the history of
organizations that have achieved something extraordinary sees that
luck and misfortune play a more substantial role than we usually
acknowledge. We do not present it as the sole explanation for
success or as an excuse for failure, but as a factor that deserves
to be taken just as seriously as the quality of management and
leadership.
"The major unexpected turns in ASML's early years he described as
'acts of God.' Not to downplay his own role, but because he knew
that several of the major plot twists lay far outside his sphere
of influence."
Three Concepts That Describe Fundamentally Different Things
Chance is the unexpected event itself - it is neither intended nor
designed. Luck, or misfortune, is how that event falls on you,
which depends on where you stand at that moment and what you have
already built. Serendipity is the third concept, and the most
useful in practice: the ability to recognize the unexpected and
make something of it, because you were prepared to see what there
was to see. Three closely related concepts that are often lumped
together under the umbrella of coincidence or luck, but that
describe fundamentally different things. And that each require a
different managerial response.
The Map That Shapes the Playing Field
One of the most striking passages in this chapter is not about
internal decisions, but about the geopolitical constellation in
which ASML was able to grow. Not the recent discussions about
export restrictions and EUV - those are the subject of other books
- but the slower, less visible structures that had already drawn
the map long before ASML had sold even a single machine.
ASML began in a world in which tensions between the United States
and Japan over trade policy and market share in the semiconductor
industry were decisive. Who you were, and where you came from in
that field of forces - trusted or suspect, neutral or politically
burdened - determined which paths were accessible and who had an
interest in working with you. A relatively small Dutch company,
far from the centers of power, turned out in that context to be an
unexpectedly useful partner for organizations seeking a
non-Japanese alternative, or those preferring to work with someone
outside the trade-policy frontlines. No one in Veldhoven had
influence over how that context had come into being. But the map
was already there, and who you met along the way - and which doors
opened - was partly determined by it.
From Coincidence to Structural Response
Using a number of concrete ASML episodes - which we will not
reveal here, but which range from a travel ban during the Gulf War
that nearly cost a critical contract, to a forgotten design choice
that years later turned out to be the key to a major technological
advantage - we show how random circumstances were turned into
durable strengths.
But the chapter does not stop there. The central question is not
only what happened by chance, but how ASML as an organization was
structured to make something of that chance. What the episodes
have in common is a structural response: an organization that was
lightly built, modular in design, and that shared information
quickly across internal and external boundaries. This made it
possible to absorb the unexpected and act on it before the window
closed. These organizational characteristics turned out to
determine whether a random event remained a risk or became a
springboard.
"Chance throws the dice. But Necessity - the structured, prepared
response - determines what is made of the outcome."
Next week: how we use theoretical lenses to lift the ASML story
beyond the boundaries of a single firm - and in doing so sharpen
your own perspective on innovation under uncertain conditions.
March 26, 2026
Waterfall - The Impossible as a Point of Departure
Blog 1 of 10 | On the First Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
Each blog previews a chapter. We pair the series with lithographs
by M. C. Escher - a deliberate choice. Escher worked in
lithography, the same printmaking technique that underpins the
semiconductor chips on which the digital world runs. More
importantly, his work invites a way of seeing we aim to cultivate
in this book: holding multiple layers at once and staying with the
tension between local logic and the seemingly impossible whole
that ASML represents.
This week's lithograph, Waterfall (1961), shows water
flowing toward a mill, falling downward, and then somehow rising
again on the other side of the aqueduct to begin the cycle anew.
Escher built it from three Penrose triangles, each individually
geometrically correct, together forming a closed loop that cannot
exist in three dimensions. The image stays with us because we
recognize something in it about how people engage with the
impossible: mathematical precision in service of human
imagination. That interplay is also key to the story this book
tells about ASML.
"Making the impossible possible was a recurring maxim within ASML."
Technology as the Carrier of the Story
EUV lithography - the technology with which ASML today helps
produce the world's most advanced chips - uses light of 13.5
nanometers, guided via mirrors with a maximum deviation of less
than 0.02 nanometers. To put that in perspective: if you scaled
that mirror surface up to the size of the Dutch province of
Brabant, the largest imperfection across the entire surface would
be a ten-centimeter sidewalk bump.
At ASML, technological progress is not just a means to a
commercial end; it effectively becomes the organizing principle of
the firm. Building the next machine, reaching the next wavelength,
and enabling the next generation so that customers can keep
improving their own processes - that is the organization's deepest
drive, and it has never fundamentally changed. Which is precisely
why it is so instructive to understand how that technological
foundation was laid and sustained: under turbulent conditions, as
markets collapsed, shareholders doubted, and competitors made
different choices. Behind every technological plateau are people
who chose a direction at decisive moments, entered into
collaborations, and persisted when doing so was, rationally
speaking, far from obviously the right call. The mechanisms behind
those decisions and that commitment are what this book seeks to
illuminate.
That deeper inquiry is why we wrote this book. ASML's success is
already well documented; what we sought to understand is how
innovative capacity is built and sustained when uncertainty is not
temporary, but persistent. ASML started on 1 April 1984 with 47
employees in wooden barracks on the Philips campus in Eindhoven,
last in a field of seven competitors. Customers were skeptical,
the parent company doubted, and the market collapsed in the very
first year. The choices made in that period accumulated over four
decades into something that, in retrospect, looks inevitable - but
never was.
We spent more than ten years on this research, in archives and in
conversations with dozens of people inside and outside ASML,
repeatedly holding those insights up against what the management
sciences have to say on comparable questions. The guiding
principle throughout was the same: when the data contradicted the
tidy story, the story had to change.
"We wrote this book to make it more broadly accessible how
innovative capacity is built and sustained when uncertainty is not
a temporary condition but a permanent one."
What You Will Find in the First Chapter
The first chapter establishes the terrain before the story begins.
A few things readers will encounter:
A concise guide to lithography, written in part from the expertise
of Martin van den Brink, former CTO and Co-President of ASML and
the technological architect behind the EUV breakthrough. Together
with us, he explains - without assuming the reader is at home in
optical physics - why reducing the images projected onto
customers' wafers as precisely as possible is at the core of
everything ASML does, and what that demands of engineering. It is
the technical context needed to follow the strategic choices
examined in the chapters that follow.
That is followed by a first exploration of something paradoxical
within ASML: despite being the de facto sole supplier of the
world's most advanced lithography machines, the word
'monopolist' is forbidden internally - not as a symbolic gesture,
but as a genuine conviction. Being the only supplier in an
interdependent supply chain does not automatically confer greater
power; customers ultimately determine what needs to be done, and
any form of complacency carries existential risk. That posture -
treating dominance as fragility - calls for explanation, and this
chapter provides it.
Finally, we sketch a picture of just how volatile the
semiconductor market truly is. On average, the sector lost more
than a fifth of its revenues in each downturn cycle over the past
forty years, sometimes within the space of months. For a company
that is fully operational and must swing rapidly between steep
scale-ups and sharp downturns - while simultaneously keeping
high-risk, long-horizon R&D programs running - this creates a
permanent tension between technological ambition, financial
manageability, and organizational flexibility. Understanding what
that tension looks like is a precondition for appreciating the
choices examined throughout the rest of the book.
Next week: the role of chance, luck, and contingency as
explanatory factors in sustained innovation and success.
