Europe has finally woken up to the reality that it has to a much greater extent design, implement, manage and improve its own defense, safety and security systems, both physical and digital. These systems cover both civil and military applications and settings at land and sea, in the air and in space. Basically, the problem that has to be solved swiftly at the European level is how to satisfy independently the Level 2 (safety needs) in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in a lasting but yet trustworthy way. Going in a comparably short time frame from a traditional passive "wait and see" strategy to a place in the driver seat with the aim to progress rapidly requires also that the improvement systems in all settings are updated to deal with the mission properly.
Taking responsibility for an adequate performance regarding Maslow's Level 2 at the European level, instead of relying to a large part on outsourced outputs from the USA, comes at a price for many of the European countries as there is understandably much to catch up with, and much could also potentially go wrong, or proceed slowly. The related cost (price) tag may not even be the largest challenge as both the time and quality aspects are in this new setting potentially even more important than the monetary considerations.
All of these Maslow Level 2 related actions at the European Level are more or less financed by taxes. It is thus important to consider how to get the most bang (=quality) for the bucks (=costs), preferably sooner than later (=time), with scarce resources. Also, a crucial related question is that how can the European countries generate more taxes in a sustainable and equitable way as there also other important areas that currently needs attention and proper funding. The answer is that this requires even more competitive companies and organizations than before, both in a absolute and relative sense, that are also able to offer meaningful employment opportunities to a sufficient extent. This is why any company in Europe can contribute by improving its networks and processes properly, incl. research and development, marketing, sales, order-delivery and after sales.
This boils down to a classic high-performance process improvement task where you need to assure the effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing the things right) in company networks and operations (processes) in a fast and cost-effective way, despite the scale of implementation. A process is the interaction of four components: people, technology, information and material to produce the desired outcome. Improving this interaction affects positively the time, quality and costs of the process.
Mind you, also your company can tribute to achieve and maintain Maslow's Level 2, also at the European level, and other Maslow's need levels for that matter, by improving your own company and its processes. This will generate needed positive effects on the micro level for all your company stakeholders such as the customers, employees, owners, society, investors, environment (cp. also Deming's chain reaction).
If the above mentioned three performance parameters, i.e. time, quality, costs, could be improved considerably, and at a larger scale, the overall gains would be beneficial for Europe as the "competitive engine" would be build-in in the processes and culture of individual companies and organizations. This is very hard to copy for anyone. However, the big problem here is that all companies and organizations, big or small, operate with a (very) low real-life process improvement yield (PIY), 0-15%, despite the bell and whistles regarding e.g. Lean, Six sigma, Agile, AI (=one technology), etc. These are actually low-performance improvement approaches that won't do when scaling up the ambition levels and performance requirements under tight resources constraints.
So the question you need to ask yourself is: "Are your improvement "guns" really in proper shape to cope with today's and tomorrow's performance requirements?". Even with no apparent enemy in sight, calm weather, and a blue sky, your improvement "gun" may still be outdated, albeit functional, as circumstances may change rapidly. After all, the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" won't do in this case.
Let's have a chat to see how your company and processes could be improved by increasing considerably your real-life process improvement traction!
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