Speaking at a Luxembourg Poland Business Chamber event on Thursday, economy minister Etienne Schneider said: “First of all he didn’t know what Luxembourg was or where it was. And he wasn’t really interested in working with us.”

Schneider said Rifkin read up on Luxembourg and within a few weeks called phone to say he had changed his mind.

“He said he would really like to do this with the Luxembourg government because he saw all the premises you need in order to transform your economy and digitalise the economy are already here,”  the minister recounted at the business event.

The collaboration began 18 months ago when Luxembourg gathered 300 experts from different places and researchers to analyse the situation in Luxembourg and develop ideas with Rifkin on how to make the economy sustainable.

The outcome was a 475-page guidebook known as the “Third Industrial Revolution Strategy Study”, which was published at the end of 2016.

The document calls for the convergence of new communication methods with new sources of energy and new modes of mobility to make economic activity more efficient and bring change, along with the application of circular economy principles and a sharing economy.

The report will serve as a guideline for future policies in Luxembourg.

“Now we have put in place nine platforms working on the different aspects in order to make suggestions to the government about what the next steps should be and whether infrastructure should be put in place and what new initiatives the government should take,” said Schneider.

The talk, which was hosted at La Table de Belvedere, summarised Luxembourg’s plans for the future.

In his welcome speech, Luxembourg Poland business chamber chairman Artur Sosna announced that Polish airline LOT will double its connections between Luxembourg and Warsaw to 11 per week starting May.