Competition enablers: observations with Ifri

The level of optimism for potential growth in the market is a welcome surprise, but generally isolated from other economically-driven activities – namely, the respective geopolitical and geoeconomic inhibitors to growth. 

Our observations and analysis at Ifri consider the current, next and future decades to try to capture precise intentions of the respective political leaderships. This approach gives us a different view of the global outlook and competition enablers from those in the business community, but with similar findings. 

Main observations 

• Overall, we have observed a degradation of the strategic situation for Europe. The turning point was almost 10 years ago and what is striking to us is the fact that geopolitical risk was not seen as something important. Things are certainly different now since Brexit, pandemics and more recently with the return of conventional warfare on European soil.
• The main risk to any organisation operating, never mind competing, is global warming and its speed – the speed of the loss of biodiversity and pollution. Leaders need to recognise that the risks they will have to deal with are broader than those directly impacting business activities. 
• Supply chains and competitive opportunities in European markets have been disrupted. This has created pressure on organisations to shift operations, production and service lines as a result of increased risks and geopolitical conflict. 
• It’s not surprising that leaders have a new or revised talent/retention strategy at the top of their agenda. What is a surprise, is how low this still is in the overall percentage of leaders prioritising it. While it’s still a top three priority, I would have expected it to be much higher as one of the critical enablers for remaining competitive in the coming years. 
• There is a real concentration of wealth and power in a few different industries and again we see the technology sector emerge strong with successful expansion into different segments or other industries. If we look at SpaceX owning around 50% of global satellites outside Earth, for instance – over 2,000 satellites compared to the European Space Agency’s 45. So, it is a unique concentration and related to what we can call these critical enablers to competition and economic activities that should be carefully observed. 
• The growing importance of political capital: how do you accumulate it? Does your company have it? To what extent? In what ways should you be leveraging it? These are the questions leaders should be asking themselves and giving more attention in strategic planning to confidently understand the key trends and understand the challenges. I expect measurement of geopolitical risk will become more common for analysis at board or investor level and we are only at the beginning of this process. 
• When it comes to global warming, our collective power of transformation is clearly higher than our collective power for anticipating this transformation. Businesses and leaders should deal with this challenge.

Thomas Gomart is a French historian of international relations and has been the Director of Ifri, a French think tank on international relations and geopolitics, since 2015. He has published several books on Russia, digital governance, French foreign policy and global challenges. Previously, he was Ifri’s Vice President for Strategic Development from 2010 and the Director of its Russia/NIS Centre between 2004 and 2013. His latest book, L’acceleration de l’Histoire, was published in January 2024.