Editorial by Managing Director Alexander De Beir
Remember last week?
Probably the hottest end of May ever measured in Belgium. Without appropriate cooling systems, we tended to lose a huge part of our energy. The lucky, or rather foreseeing, companies managed to cope thanks to air-conditioning and heat pumps, while enjoying the full return from their solar panels in an economy… chilled by geopolitically disturbed energy prices.
For people like me, born in the second half of the twentieth century, energy has seldom been an issue in the past. There was no question of real scarcity. The surge of energy prices in the early seventies or nineties did not really impact the way of living or working in a dramatic sense. Nor were any real symptoms of climate change palpable in those times, although human activity had already started provoking long-term consequences for the health of our planet.
In 2026, the game of life has changed. Despite what climate sceptics may pretend, we’d better prepare ourselves for the… unexpected. I am anything but a doomsayer and strongly believe in our agility and capability as humans to adapt to the most unpredictable circumstances. And I am also a strong believer in the capacity of new technologies to help humanity progress in the right direction.
Today more than ever, I feel strengthened in this conviction when reading that Ghent has reached tenth place in the world’s ranking of most innovative cities and fourth in Europe as far as technology is concerned. Under the umbrella name “the future is tech”, a huge ecosystem of state-of-the-art start-ups, scale-ups and even enterprises employing hundreds of people has made Ghent a key player in biotech, cleantech, healthtech and digitech respectively, from which our whole country and regions far beyond are benefiting. Too often, we hear that Europe is losing the technology battle. When crossing the streets of Ghent and its surroundings, it becomes obvious that many engineers, creators and entrepreneurs originating from all parts of the world believe exactly the opposite.
Bed of roses? Time to get up!
However, the worst we could do is rest on our laurels. We need to prepare our future generation to be more robust, creative and agile than ever. They will give our “old continent” an everlasting rejuvenating mindset based on three fundamental principles: 1) phasing out our dependence on other continents for energy sources while remaining interactive and open-minded, as strong believers in and protagonists of open trade; 2) making our youth, the workforce of the future, aware that in this world, nothing is guaranteed forever (remember COVID); 3) anticipating the unpredictable.
This last one may sound like a contradiction in terms, but conceive it as a motto. A new generation of managers will arise from our schools, confronting the whole education system with many challenges to prepare them well for the future. As existing managers and entrepreneurs, we will contribute to arming them with the right mindset to be sustainably successful. The next article gives a couple of ideas, inspirations and insights on how to build up a successful career by taking key themes like energy and climate into account.
Spread the word, share your drive!
