Guarded Globalization: How Deglobalisation Is Rewriting Tech—and Why Europe’s Industry 5.0 Wins on Trust

TL;DR: Deglobalisation has accelerated a shift from limitless scale to guarded globalization: the U.S., Europe, and Asia are each protecting core IP, re-anchoring production, and partnering selectively. The advantage no longer comes from dominating every category, but from cultivating differentiated regional IP and building collaboration interfaces that enable trusted cross-border work. Europe’s Industry 5.0—human-centric, resilient, and sustainability-led—positions it to win on trust.

The shift: from “everywhere” to “in the right place”

For two decades, tech scaled on globally optimized supply chains. Post-2023, governments and firms are re-weighting toward resilience, sovereignty, and security. The playbook now emphasizes:
• Reshoring and friend-shoring for critical components and assembly.
• Data residency and IP retention where inventions are made and monetized.
• Selective collaboration via standards, joint labs, and trusted partners.
Core thesis: The real moat is regional IP plus collaboration interfaces—not shouting the loudest or trying to win every category.

Three regional archetypes (illustrative highlights)

United States — Incentivized reshoring and a doctrine of resilience
• Industrial policy (chips, clean tech, infrastructure) catalyzes domestic fabs and advanced manufacturing.
• Firms localize sensitive R&D and high-value assembly to protect trade secrets and mitigate geopolitical risk.

China and broader Asia — Systemic self-reliance, parallel stacks
• National drive to indigenous capability across the stack (design → fab → assembly → materials).
• Emergent parallel ecosystems (standards, suppliers, platforms) to reduce exposure to external controls.

Europe — Strategic autonomy and the Industry 5.0 edge
• “Open strategic autonomy”: collaboration-friendly but IP-protective, with emphasis on ethics, safety, and human well-being.
• Differentiation is trust: privacy, compliance, sustainability, and worker-centric modernization.

What changes for leaders

Founders and product leaders
• Place core R&D in your “IP home”; use friend-shored partners for scale and testing.
• Build data-safe APIs and model-sharing protocols to collaborate without leaking crown-jewel IP.

Enterprises and boards
• Track a Friend-Shored Dependency Ratio (share of critical inputs from trusted partners).
• Treat trust (privacy, safety, explainability, labor impact) as a first-class KPI, not a compliance afterthought.

Policymakers and ecosystem builders
• Fund bridges, not walls: cross-border testbeds, standards alliances, and talent corridors among trusted regions.
• Measure IP Retention Rate and Local Content % to anchor long-term capability at home.

Europe’s quiet power: win on trust, not volume

Europe doesn’t need to out-shout the U.S. or out-scale China. A human-centric, Industry 5.0 pathway compounds advantages where customers, regulators, and workers value:
• Reliable governance (privacy-by-design, safety-by-default).
• Sustainable value chains with traceable inputs and circularity.
• Augmented work, not just automated work.
This “quiet power” is durable: it compounds through reputation, standards adoption, and ecosystem lock-in.

Section: A Stockholm note
The Nordics are positioned to act as a neutral collaboration node: high trust, strong public-private coordination, and design-led culture. That combination is ideal for piloting human-centric AI, advanced manufacturing, and cross-border standards that preserve IP while enabling real-world impact.

Section: Key metrics to operationalize the shift

• IP Retention Rate: percentage of high-value inventions kept and commercialized within the region.
• Friend-Shored Dependency Ratio: percentage of critical suppliers located in trusted jurisdictions.
• Human-Centric Compliance Score: composite of privacy, safety, labor augmentation, and sustainability metrics.
• Local Content % (Critical Path): share of core components made domestically or by trusted partners.
• Time-to-Assurance: lead time to meet safety/ethics requirements for launch (a proxy for trust velocity).

Call to action

If you’re a founder, enterprise leader, or policymaker shaping this next chapter, design your collaboration moat now: anchor core IP locally, standardize how you share, and measure trust as a product feature.
Interested in piloting a human-centric, friend-shored program out of Stockholm? Get in touch.