Europe,Innovation & Future

Stephen Wildstrom writes, despite Europe having everything to be a hotbed of high-tech innovation: a highly educated workforce, great universities, a solid legal system, and advanced financial market - it is anything but. The Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the region is home to only 143 of the world's top 1,000 software companies. Excluding Britain and Israel, just 88 are found in continental Europe. European tech entrepreneurs and investors, are working in hopes of producing a white paper laying out an agenda for a European "innovation ecosystem." The fundamental problem seems to be a culture that fails to reward risk-taking.
Europe has a long history of successful invention, but a weak history of turning those inventions into innovations,that makes money or saves money. The people needs to have the courage to be different.There was general agreement that changing a culture deeply suspicious of the values that foster entrepreneurship - ambition, the willingness to stand out and be different, a desire to challenge the established order, even a bit of greed - will be hard to come by. The crushing defeat of the proposed European constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands was universally viewed as evidence of the resistance to change. One view expressed is that U.S. regulatory climate has become more hostile to startups and the compliance requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley Act alone will cost small, publicly traded companies $4 million a year, and this might encourage many startups to look to the London Stock Exchange's AIM market over the Nasdaq.