Susanne van der Velden and Mohammad N. Nasiri spent more than a decade studying how ASML grew from a Philips spin-off into Europe’s most valuable company and a global leader in the high-tech industry. Their book Lessons Learned from ASML is now available internationally. In it, the authors answer the question: what can organisations learn from ASML about building and sustaining innovation under uncertainty?
How does a small, loss-making joint venture in wooden sheds become the provider of the most critical machine in the global semiconductor supply chain? ASML’s rise is often viewed as a story about technology, semiconductors or geopolitics. This book takes a different perspective. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with around thirty current and former executives, customers, suppliers and competitors, the authors reconstruct how ASML evolved from an underdog into one of the most influential players in the semiconductor industry.
The book offers a detailed analysis of the decisions, dilemmas and breakthroughs required to build a successful technology company over several decades. It examines the strategic choices behind the company’s success: experimentation and staged investment under uncertainty, collaboration across technological ecosystems, long-term knowledge and capability building, and the strong leadership required to stay the course in an industry that is constantly evolving.
Inside the book
The book combines a historical narrative with lessons drawn from it. After an opening chapter explaining why ASML’s history matters to anyone leading under uncertainty, the authors retrace forty years in five acts: from near-bankruptcy and a patent war to a twenty-year bet on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography that paid off only in 2018.
The chapters that follow each take up a central theme. The first examines four organising principles, distilled from ASML’s original 1984 business plan, that recur across every crisis and development phase, staying stable in essence while adapting in practice. The second looks at how the semiconductor industry organised collective progress in the 1990s through shared roadmaps and structured rivalry, and the third at how to act strategically before it is clear which technology will win. One chapter stands apart, asking how much of ASML’s success came down to chance.
The book then broadens out, testing the evidence against management theory, offering the authors’ personal perspectives and translating the insights for managers, deep-tech founders, corporate executives and policymakers. The final chapter distils one essential lesson from each chapter and asks what those lessons demand of the reader.
Breakthroughs are not enough
The story of ASML demonstrates that technological breakthroughs alone are not enough. Sustainable success emerges from the interplay between technology, organisation and ecosystem: from decades of building knowledge, partnerships and organisational capabilities, and from the ability to make strategic choices time and again in an uncertain world.
Lessons Learned from ASML is relevant well beyond the high-tech sector. To entrepreneurs, executives, policymakers and organisations facing a pressing question today: how do you build sustainable innovation capacity in a world where uncertainty is the only constant? Rather than offering a recipe for success, the book provides a framework for thinking about how organisations can innovate, adapt and grow when outcomes are uncertain and technological trajectories remain unclear.
‘Few investors would bet their money on this venture today. The story of ASML is therefore not a recipe that can be easily copied by other high-tech start-ups. However, a lot can be learned from looking at what happened.’
— Gjalt Smit, ASML’s first CEO