Waterfall — the impossible as a starting point
- Susanne van der Velden
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Blog 1 of 10 | On the first chapter of Lessons from ASML
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Over the next ten weeks, a blog will appear here weekly in the run-up to the publication of Lessons from ASML — Building and sustaining innovativeness under uncertainty, which I co-authored with Dr. Mohammad Nasir Nasiri and which will be published by Lannoo Campus this spring. Each blog offers a preview of a chapter. For our visual accompaniment, we chose the lithographs of MC Escher. This choice has a double meaning: Escher worked in the lithographic technique, the same printing technique that underlies the semiconductor chips on which the entire digital world runs. But his work also invites a way of looking that we aim to achieve with this book: seeing multiple layers simultaneously, the tension between local logic and the seemingly impossible whole of ASML.
Waterfall from 1961 shows water flowing past a watermill, falling downwards, and then seemingly flowing upwards by itself to begin the cycle anew. Escher constructed it on three Penrose triangles, each individually geometrically correct, together forming a closed loop that cannot exist in three dimensions. The image touches us because we recognize in it how people relate to the impossible: mathematical precision in the service of human imagination. That interplay is also the key to the story this book attempts to tell about ASML.
Making the impossible possible was a recurring adage within ASML.
Technology as a carrier of the story
EUV lithography, the technology with which ASML helps produce the world's most advanced chips today, uses 13.5-nanometer light via mirrors with a maximum deviation of less than 0.02 nanometers. By comparison: if you scale up that mirror surface to the size of the province of Brabant, the largest irregularity is a ten-centimeter curb across the entire surface.
At ASML, technological progress is not merely a means to a commercial end; it is the organizational principle of the company itself. Building the next machine, reaching the next wavelength, enabling the next generation so that customers become ever more productive: that is the deepest driving force of the organization, and it has never fundamentally changed. That is precisely why it is so instructive to understand how that technological and organizational foundation was laid and maintained. Under turbulent circumstances, while the market collapsed, shareholders hesitated, and competitors made different choices. Behind every technological plateau are people who, at decisive moments, chose a direction, entered into a partnership, and persevered when, from a rational perspective, doing so was by no means always defensible. In this book, we shine a light on the mechanisms behind the decisions and the dedication.
That depth is why we wrote this book. Not to celebrate the success—after all, that is already well documented—but to better understand how innovation capacity is built and sustained when uncertainty is not a temporary state but a permanent condition. ASML started on April 1, 1984, with 47 employees in wooden barracks on the Philips site in Eindhoven, the last in a line of seven competitors. Customers had doubts, the parent company had doubts, and the market collapsed immediately in the first year. The choices made during that period accumulated over four decades into something that seems inevitable in hindsight, but never was.
We have devoted time to this research for more than ten years, in archives, in conversations with dozens of people inside and outside ASML, and have repeatedly compared those insights with what management science has to say about the subject. The guiding principle was always the same: if the data contradicted the nice story, then the story had to change.
We wrote this book to make it more understandable for a broader audience how innovation capacity is built and maintained when uncertainty is not a temporary state but a permanent condition.
What you will find in this chapter
The first chapter establishes the setting before the story begins. A number of things readers can find there:
A concise guide to lithography, compiled with the help of Martin van den Brink, former CTO and Co-President of ASML. He helped us—without assuming the reader is familiar with optical physics—to explain as clearly as possible why reducing images on customer wafers as precisely as possible is the core of everything ASML does. It is the technical context you need to understand the strategic choices in the subsequent chapters.
Additionally, an initial exploration of a recurring paradox in the book: ASML is the world's sole supplier of the most advanced lithography machines, yet internally, complacency is taboo—not as a symbolic gesture, but stemming from a deep conviction. Being indispensable in a supply-chain-dependent industry does not necessarily mean having more power; customers determine what needs to be done, and treating dominance as fragility requires a different perspective. That attitude, and the reasoning behind it, are presented in this chapter.
Finally, we outline just how volatile the semiconductor market truly is. On average, over the past forty years, the sector has lost more than a fifth of its revenue per downturn cycle, sometimes within the span of months. Understanding what that tension looks like is a prerequisite for properly assessing the choices discussed in the rest of the book.
Next week: the role of chance, luck, and coincidence as explanatory factors of success and innovation capacity.
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