Geopolitical turbulence is no longer a distant concern for boardrooms – it is reshaping business strategy across Belgium and Europe in real time. At the latest Dean’s Club gathering, hosted by Antwerp Management School (AMS), senior business leaders, academics, and policy experts convened to examine how organisations can adapt, lead, and remain competitive in an era of profound geopolitical disruption. Two themes dominated the conversation: Europe’s urgent need for a coherent geopolitical strategy, and the imperative to keep innovating even under pressure.
The Dean’s Club is a prestigious, invitation-only community comprising CEOs and Managing Directors drawn from the trusted network of business partners of Antwerp Management School. Founded in May 2021, the club meets twice a year to foster candid, high-level discussion on the most pressing challenges facing business and society. By uniting leaders from the corporate world, academia, and government, it aims to surface actionable insights and model the kind of positive, forward-looking leadership that complex times demand.
The session was marked by frank exchanges and a genuine sense of urgency. Input came from all sides – practitioners grappling with day-to-day operational pressures and strategists thinking at a continental scale – producing two clear and compelling takeaways.
The discussion was shaped in no small part by three key contributors: Prof. Dr. Robert Burgelman, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Fiel Vanthemse, Deputy Permanent Representative of Belgium to NATO; and Prof. Dr. Steffi Weil, who facilitated the session with skill and precision, keeping the dialogue focused even as the debate gathered momentum.
Innovation as a strategic imperative: why businesses must keep moving in a crisis
Crises push organisations and societies to make tough choices. But pulling back on innovation during hard times is a mistake – one that both history and recent experience make clear. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, forced companies to digitise fast, rethink supply chains, and build resilience. Crisis doesn’t freeze progress, it triggers it. But only for those who keep moving.
That message resonated strongly at the latest Dean’s Club. Keynote speakers and participants alike agreed: in a world defined by geopolitical instability and shifting alliances, inertia is not a neutral position – it is a strategic failure. Across sectors from cybersecurity and energy to healthcare and defence, organisations that sustain their innovation efforts during turbulent periods consistently emerge in a stronger competitive position. Professor Robert Burgelman framed this through the lens of “Moore’s Second Law”: the insight that halting innovation in difficult times does not simply pause progress, it compounds the deficit that must be overcome once the crisis subsides.
Belgian SMEs, in particular, know what it means to adapt. They’ve learned to compete alongside much larger global players. Now is the time to turn those lessons into action, by streamlining operations, adopting smart technologies like AI, and focusing on what truly drives value. For European companies, innovation means investing in both hard power – like defense and cybersecurity – and soft power – such as intelligence and adaptability – so that businesses and countries can stay resilient and competitive, even in uncertain times. It also means embracing collaboration, both within and across borders, to share knowledge and resources. And it means seeing failure not as a setback, but as a valuable learning opportunity.
More broadly, innovation is a mindset. A broader societal mindshift is needed, so that innovation becomes everyone’s business, not just the responsibility of a few.
Europe’s geopolitical strategy gap: defining priorities in a multipolar world
The world has moved from a broadly stable, bipolar structure to a far more volatile multipolar reality, and Europe has been slow to reckon with what that means. Long-held assumptions – including the reliability of US security guarantees – can no longer be treated as fixed. The war in Ukraine, the resurgence of populist nationalism, and the growing assertiveness of powers such as China have laid bare a fundamental vulnerability at the heart of the European project: the absence of a coherent, shared geopolitical strategy.
This challenge cannot be reduced to questions of military spending or trade policy alone. At its core, it is about identity and agency: what Europe stands for, what it is prepared to defend, and whether the continent can act with sufficient unity and speed to matter on the global stage. As Professor Robert Burgelman argued, Europe has for too long relied on “strategic somnambulism” – sleepwalking through geopolitical change while depending on others to underwrite its security. Preserving European autonomy demands a deliberate change of course: a credible geopolitical strategy backed by genuine commitment to security, diplomacy, and sustained innovation.
But developing a European geopolitical strategy means answering tough questions: who speaks for Europe? How do we balance national interests with collective action? And can we move quickly enough in a crisis, or does our commitment to democracy slow us down? To move forward, Europe needs more than internal debate. Only with strategic leadership – capable of uniting diverse interests and acting decisively – can the continent avoid being sidelined.
Europe’s strength has always been its values and its ability to collaborate. But values alone are not enough. The group agreed that, at the European level, investing in both hard power and soft power is necessary for building a coherent geopolitical strategy. At the same time, Europe needs to form new strategic partnerships and reduce its reliance on traditional sources of support – such as the United States for security and Russia for energy. By building new alliances and becoming less dependent on these established relationships, Europe can strengthen its position.
