This week, we read Agenda Nieuw Amsterdam, and it does the thing the other two reports do not quite manage. It makes all of this local.
Where Europe 2031 looks at a continent and Rapport Wennink at a country, Agenda Nieuw Amsterdam looks at here. It is an essay by Ruben Nieuwenhuis — who presented the first version of this thinking at ORAM Next Gen Festival last year — written with more than a hundred entrepreneurs, technologists and researchers from this region, and it uses Rapport Wennink as its economic compass. Its central claim is that we are in the middle of a crossing: from a knowledge economy, which ran on access to scarce knowledge, to what it calls an intelligence economy, which runs on the ability to turn information into action.
Fixers and builders
The line from the essay that stays with you is simple. It distinguishes fixers from builders. Fixers repair and optimise what already exists. Builders create what does not exist yet. Both are necessary, the essay argues, but a region that runs only on fixers slowly loses its edge, because it becomes very good at maintaining a world that is quietly being replaced.
"A region that runs only on fixers slowly loses its edge, because it becomes very good at maintaining a world that is quietly being replaced."
The essay frames this as a distinction, not a verdict. Most of us are fixers most of the time, and for good reason. Still, the question it poses is worth sitting with. In your own work, are you mostly keeping something running, or mostly bringing something new into being? And which does your team actually need more of right now?
The unglamorous parts
The essay is also honest about what an intelligence economy actually runs on. Not ambition — energy, compute, and broad access, so that it is built for more than a lucky few. The transition is real, but it is not free, and it is not automatic.
This is exactly what one part of the festival is designed to address. In the Pressure Cooker Sessions, small groups take a real, unsolved challenge from a partner organisation and work it down — under time pressure — to one concrete next step. Not "we should look into this." An actual first move.
And the output does not disappear when the music starts. It is collected, taken back to the partners who brought the challenge, and carried forward by ORAM afterwards. That is the whole difference between a festival and a platform. The reading you do in August becomes a room on the 28th, and the room keeps working after everyone goes home.
Are you fixing what exists, or building what does not exist yet?