Where are Europe's Innovative Companies?

Into Europe: Europe has failed to take advantage of the technological revolution of the 3rd industrial revolution. Europe's lack of large tech and internet-based companies, as well as a struggling start-up eco-system.

Can Europe step up to the ask on the race towards innovation and catch up with the United States and China?

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[briancheng]

Most of Silicon Valley absorbs the talented Europeans in a braindrain fashion sadly...

[traposucio]

This channel is golden. Thank you for making this videos. Hope it grows in subscribers

[koopo]

Very happy to eventually see a dedicated European Union channel. Keep the good job. I wonder why the E.U lacks so much behind on media and communication

[Nonamearisto]

The real problem is not that European countries have different languages and cultures- most tech workers know English- but that they have the same aversion to risk. If an entrepreneur goes bankrupt in the US or his company fails, he can try again if he can find more investors, and if the idea is good, previous failure rarely counts against him unless he was criminal and/or extremely negligent. In Europe, one bankruptcy or failure in business is like the mark of Cain on a businessman, and he'll likely be unable to get investment in any future projects of his ever again.

Most European countries also make it hard to fire workers or to get them to work longer hours than usual, which are critical when a tech company has to scale up or down in response to a product launch.

[luuges]

Especially in Germany (where i live) the people start to forget where our wealth comes from and that its still a competition to stay walthy. But unfortunately they will have the results in like 50 years and then its already too late.

[gameoob]

This is so high quality, thank you for talking about this important topic!

[nokaton]

It's actually "Nokia", "Siemens", and "Ericsson" .. but ... those days are gone. And most of them nowadays focus more on selling technical-professional level products rather than consumer level products. So, us general publics don't hear much about them anymore in the news.

[andrasadam]

Damn, Europe is just upright disappointing at times. So much potential, so many options and ways to improve, but none of it is happening. Why? Because people are unwilling to overcome century old differences and grudges. It's sad really...

[-FK-]

I don't claim to be an expert on Europe or the EU, but from the bit I do know and what was touched on in this video it seems the EU's strict bureaucratic regulations and perhaps how difficult it is to create a business (especially one as expensive as a tech startup) may contribute as to why. No doubt there are very bright and intelligent people with ideas-- but if they are constrained in such a way, their only alternative is to relocate.

[haxman]

A very well explained video, I never really noticed or knew that there were so few tech and innovative companies in Europe, but now I can't unsee it. Anyway well done

[nikolaytotev]

Reading the comments shows why Europe is behind in technology compared to even smaller parts of the world, South Korea, Taiwan and etc. Seems like most people are in denial of the lack of established global European tech companies both hardware and software. You don't need to be a genius or invest hours of research to understand that most of the services and devices we use were developed/imported outside of the EU...

In my opinion, this is because of the lack of European strategy to establish a union-wide innovation hub within the EU supporting the development of new technologies. EU has all the resources to do it and why it is not done is beyond me...

Also, English must be established as the main business language regardless if it is situated in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria or any other country so talent across the continent can be attracted and make it easy to work with international partners/workforce... It is not that difficult, just create an EU Innovation Board that focus on the development of a strategic EU city serving as a hub for the continent.

[lemagnifique]

I think the main problem is the lack of entrepreneurial mentality. There's a lot of European engineers work in hi-tech companies run by Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, even Indian, and Indonesian.

Second is regulation, EU is tend to be more strict on regulation that will detain the development just because of "protecting the privacy" or anything.

Having the small market isn't an excuses, South Korea with smaller population can have many innovative tech brands

[powresitta]

Inovations don't come from big tech, they just buy all small companies with good Inovations and market it into monopoly. That's where big money comes into play. Europe is I believe home of biggest number of small to medium businesses that are motors of Inovations.

[blainegabbertgabonemhofgoa]

The difference is between American and European VCs. European VCs don’t have balls. American VCs will invest in any crazy idea even if it has a 1% chance to work. European VCs don’t take as much risks and mainly invest in proven business models. This is why a lot of European startups are just clones of American startups adapted to the European market.

[arichis]

At 0:43 you forgot to highlight Bosch, Adidas, ABB, FCA, and Novartis as being European in the top 50 most innovative list.

[enrico]

I mean, for a while, Nokia had an extreme success, even though it was from the EU.

[shintsu]

I work in software development and what I personally experienced is. 2 companies I worked for were bought and basically the tech and customer bases were absorbed and now they are no longer a EU company.

In other scenario's 2 other companies i worked for had a lot of challenges to go to other countries in the EU. Mainly due to 1. Language 2. Culture 3. Infra simple example is the way Telephones and Postal codes work in other countries turned out to holding down these companies to easily move into other countries. Also due to local culture, the product worked in the Native country but the market of other EU countries was not yet mature/ready for such services at that point.

[jiriwichern]

No 'big' companies means no innovation? And then you have to realize, GDP wise, the E.U. (and that's only 2/3's of Europe, because the U.K., Switzerland, Norway etc. make up the rest of it) market is much larger than the Chinese and only slightly behind that of the U.S. while its population is less than a third of China's and 4/3s of the U.S.
So where does that productivity come from if we don't have big mega conglomerates that generate wads of $$$? It can't be only trade because trade goes stale very quickly if you have nothing to trade for. Colonialism is something we left behind almost a century ago, and nowadays is more of a China thing, so that can't be it either. Natural resources aren't a big thing in Europe anymore except for Norway and Russia, which both are not part of the numbers (non-E.U.). As you pointed out in the video, only 1% of the economy is agrarian so it's not like we export massive amounts of food to offset all other sources (actually, the country I come from does export massively innovative/expensive agrarian produce, out-exporting the U.S. while being less than a 20th of its size, but that's another story). And the gold standard has been abandoned a loooong time ago but the European currencies still hold their value.
It's not like the E.U. is 'resting on its laurels'. That's an impossibility in a globalized economy, of which the E.U. is certainly part of. You can only take on debt so long before the debtors come knocking on your door (as some less fortunate E.U. nations recently found out). And producing nothing anyone wants and expect to import all goods you desire is a way to quickly send yourself to oblivion (I'm looking at you too, Brexit). So somehow all business activity and wealth generation in the E.U. has to be done in other ways than through 'big' 'innovative' companies. And probably its 'medium' and 'small' companies that do the job quite adequately. As you already said in the video, Europe (and now I'm explicitly excluding the U.K. here for obvious reasons) has a different take on what defines the free in free-market capitalism because Laissez-faire and the allowance of monopolies restrict freedoms of everyone else (and there are > 7 billion everyone elses in this world) and thus are anti-capitalistic (because they basically restrict everyone's freedom, including freedom of trade). There is no freedom without rules; only conflict and anarchy. That's something Europeans and European nations learned the hard way through one and a half millennium of conflict. I think the E.U. is just the right compromise between the possibility to express your own freedom and not restrict that of everyone else.

[ruud]

Edit: first and foremost, great video xD.
Like you said Europe or even the EU isn't a single country, but a bunch of smaller countries combined. So honestly I never expected them to have big tech giants. However are all these things you called really a good representation of how innovative Europe is? For example: If I remember right the Netherlands is the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, despite its size. If I remember right this is because they trade in genetically modified seeds. Sure this doesn't make them a tech giant, but does this not count as being a giant on an innovative level? I'm sure there are plenty more of these kinds of examples in Europe.

[catboynestormakhno]

Never forget that keeping power decentralized has always been the advantage of europe, we have always had some of the smallest kingdoms, and our church nobel and merchant guilds were way more split up in europe than anywhere else in the world, decentralization is our strength