
Why does Europe suck at technological innovation? - PixelRobot
http://www.slate.com/id/2296547
======
micheljansen
As a "European" from The Netherlands, I feel I need to say something about the
inflammatory title of this article. Europe does not "suck" at technological
innovation, there is simply no such thing as "Europe" at this scale. Like the
article says: Europe is still 27 very different markets.

As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform
market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As
such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that
market.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American,
simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo,
eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny
country of The Netherlands. And Europe does not just sprout small tech
startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge
players in their fields.

Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market
and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but
saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the
innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It
is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but
instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners.

P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well?

P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine?
Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.

~~~
eibrahim
Wait, you mean Europe is not a country? That's funny... I always hear that
complain from my "African" friends... Now you know how it feels to lump people
into one group "African", "Middle Eastern", "Asians", etc... :)

~~~
micheljansen
Excellent point. I never said it is good to lump anyone into any category, but
I am not writing articles for Slate :)

------
Joeri
The article isn't based on any sort of objective measurement, so we can't say
objectively that europe has less technological innovation, only subjectively.

I live in Belgium, and in my opinion I've had plenty of opportunity to do
interesting innovative work. 6 years ago I wrote an SVG renderer in
actionscript, on top of a DXF-to-SVG convertor in PHP. 5 years ago I wrote my
own rich web grid component, backed by a metaquery system that allows users to
point-and-click together arbitrary filters. 3 years ago I switched to a web
app architecture of javascript components over JSON-RPC services.

IMHO, that was interesting and innovative work, but you've never heard of the
product it went into (myMCS), because the company I work for focuses on the
european market and has decided to do that without seeking external financing.
That's typical of european tech companies. They operate on a local market, and
they take on less risk so they don't grow as aggressively. That doesn't mean
there's less innovation, just that it's less visible.

------
carsongross
Europe is great at technological innovation.

Why do Americans make more money in software?

* Pure inertia from the early cowboy days of Silicon Valley, which gave us great universities and lots of private investment capital looking for _returns_. (Contrast with academic grants.)

* A more straight-forward focus on technology-for-moneys-sake (really anything-for-moneys-sake) and marketing

* The U.S. development culture, to Dijkstra's eternal chagrin, is much more "Worse Is Better" so we tend to ship early, often and win the market, even though our stuff kind of sucks.

------
laut
While the US has brought the world many great technological innovations,
"Europe" on the whole doesn't suck at it. And Europe is not France, it's a
continent with many different countries.

If we are talking about the internet, these things were made by Europeans: The
World Wide Web, Skype, C++, PHP, MySQL, Rails. Just to name a few things.

The car industry is also pretty high tech and the European car companies are
doing well while the government run car companies of the US suck. A few of the
many car related innovations from Europe: the car itself, ABS, Electronic
Stability Control.

------
paganel
I'd rather have my car powered by a German engine (well, it's manufactured in
"lazy" Spain by a German company, but it's European all the same). It consumes
way less gasoline compared to US cars, and it's also a lot more reliable.

Some of you could say that reliable, low-consuming car engines do not count as
"technological innovation", that we should give more praise to technological
"innovators" like Facebook and Zynga. Then again, having FB or FarmVille down
doesn't cause any wars, while being able to drive cars that consume less
gasoline might avoid a war or two.

------
stfp
It just isn't true. Europe just does not "suck" at tech innovation. Some
europeans move to the US to have a bigger impact, and/or because that's where
tech money is.

The US evolved a giant media+capital machine to make this happen, and this
means making it hard for others to do the same - by being more attractive, in
real terms of course, but maybe even more so in people's minds. I see articles
criticizing other regions of the world for not having as much success as part
of this (very natural, imho) process.

------
btilly
An interesting data point. Look at the top 5 languages in the TIOBE index. Of
them C++, C# and PHP were all created by Europeans. (In fact all 3 are Danes
by birth.) To the best of my knowledge their founders live in Texas,
Washington and California respectively.

This is not a small problem for Europe.

~~~
jarek
Except Rasmus was born on Greenland and was in university in Ontario when he
created PHP. Claim Ontario or Canada as a capitalist paradise at your own risk
:).

~~~
btilly
Rasmus was born on Greenland which is a Danish possession, so he is a Danish
citizen by birth. Which makes him a Dane, as I said. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf> for verification.

Furthermore I didn't make any claims about a "capitalist paradise", either
explicitly or implicitly. In fact another of the three is Bjarne Stroustrup, a
professor in academia. He may live in the USA, but he's an academic, and
academia is generally not filled with rabid capitalists.

~~~
jarek
I'm not sure how a data point this specific is then interesting for this
subject. Three people, having been born as Danish citizens, went on to become
original creators of three most popular languages today, two of whom did so in
generally fairly uncapitalistic environments, now live in the U.S. This is not
a small problem for Europe.

~~~
btilly
It is interesting because the data point is not an isolated example.

From Dijkstra to Torvalds, there are a many prominent examples of top notch
computer talent from Europe choosing to live in the USA. The resulting brain
drain leaves fewer top people in Europe, and more opportunities for Americans
to benefit from that talent. Benefits range from their availability for
American businesses to the fact that it is easier to meet and be inspired by
that talent if you live in the USA. (Particularly if you live near a tech
center like Silicon Valley.)

------
hassy
The title of the article is misleading. Yearly revenues do not necessarily
mean technological innovation. There is plenty of innovation in Europe (and a
lot of it gets sold to US companies who get to increase their annual revenues
with it).

------
synx508
ARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the
headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive
mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.

~~~
jarek
Nokia anyone? Massive innovation in terms of creating cheap, portable tiny
computers that we now derisively call "dumb phones" early on, when no one else
was doing anything like it. Other smartphone players just came in and skimmed
off the top ;)

------
scythe
Small markets doesn't seem to explain it. Germany alone has the world's
fourth-largest GDP, which sounds like a pie worth slicing. Despite this,
Russia, whose GDP is less than half as large, has a bigger (iirc) tech
industry than Germany. I think the latter explanation -- market restrictions
-- is more likely, and research spending probably contributes as well.

~~~
JanezStupar
What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia
have more than Germany?

~~~
mootothemax
_What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia
have more than Germany?_

I'm wondering this as well. Surely the computing power behind Frankfurt must
be quite substantial...

~~~
JanezStupar
mail.ru?!?!? Frankfurt computing power!?!?!?

Guys were talking tech in country that built stealth planes in 40's. And that
boosted US and SSSR into space.

Have you really not seen what krauts are up to for the last 50 years? Have you
not seen those fine wagens they build. Or impressive industrial technology
they poses and continue to evolve? Have you seen the tank they built?

SAP, Siemens, BASF, BOSCH, etc... Theres hardly a piece of modern technology
built that doesn't rely on German tech.

The Germans may not be building the blingest widgets and the hipest social
media experts. But in this gold rush they are selling a metric fuckton of
shovels.

~~~
scythe
I didn't say they didn't have _any_ industry. Hell, I _work_ for Siemens.
So... yeah. Can't comment on anything substantial but suffice to say I stand
by my words.

------
sebilasse
Also Europe isn't causing massive bubbles every other year that throw half of
the world into a depression. Just wondering if this is related, not trying to
start a flame-war or whatever.

~~~
jdminhbg
Not entirely sure how you can look at the economic history of the past 3 years
or so and think Europe doesn't have any bubbles or financial crises.

But more to the point, I don't think technical innovation has much to do with
bubbles, any more than building technology caused the real estate bubble.

~~~
sebilasse
I don't see a bubble (not financial or other crises) originating in Europe
that had an impact world-wide similar to the dot-com bubble and the real
estate bubble which is partly caused by some financial "innovation" (credit
default swaps).

------
tintin
European Innovation Scoreboard:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard>

It show the gap is getting smaller with US innovations. But the article is
stupid. They do not suck at innovation.

------
mootothemax
_Why is Europe so bad at technology development? Heterogeneity, among other
things._

Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being
able to serve particular niches?

I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a
great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture,
language etc., is viewed disfavourably.

~~~
samfoo
I'm only speculating, but these are my thoughts:

1\. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers.

2\. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect
in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in
Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market.

3\. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of
scale.

~~~
stygianguest
Indeed.

Take netflix. Setting that in the 27 countries of the EU requires 27 different
contract negotiations with the respective copyright organisations.

Another example would be the social web. Suppose a French and American
facebook launch at the same date. Given the same growth rate (with the more or
less exponential networking effect), the American can simply buy the French
facebook after a small amount of time.

(Western) Europe is pretty good in technical niches, which seem to be mostly
business to business. Just not quite as visible.

Yet, as a European (through and through I might add) I believe American
innovation comes from some superbly creative and inquisitive minority. This:
<http://vimeo.com/19829560> we do not have in Europe.

Finally, do not forget that European population is shrinking and aging. That
has a tremendous effect on all growth figures. Perhaps on innovation too, but
that I doubt.

------
dhs
People, please... don't feed the trolls.

------
chl
Because we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.

~~~
adnam
Who is "we"? Tim Berners-Lee is British.

~~~
chl
According to the most recent information on hand, even the British are
considered Europeans.

(More seriously, I wish people wouldn't submit interesting articles and then
sullen them with dumbed-down, incendiary headlines.)

------
endtime
Surprised that `ctrl-F incent` yields no results in the article or the
comments. Sounds like a simple matter of incentivization to me. When you live
in a relatively socialist country that puts discouraging penalties on rewards,
why take a risk?

------
eibrahim
I think it's a cultural thing. Americans (and American immigrants) are risk
takers. So even if you are Danish, French or Egyptian by virtue of immigrating
to a new home, you have exhibited a high level of risk taking behavior. It is
only natural that this behavior turns into more entrepreneurial and innovative
ideas.

But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a
huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all
sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits
in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most
innovation takes place).

