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I think you are somewhat correct with your brainstorming scenario, but Germany was still plenty innovative in the last century.

Software technologies like MP3 came out of Germany. Companies like SAP and Hetzner are successful and german. Berlin has a healthy startup scene. Green technologies and automotive is dominated by Germany.

Overall I think Germany has plenty of risk taking engineers but the capital is more risk averse than in the US. Capital includes angel investors and pension funds and everything in between.

>Software technologies like MP3 came out of Germany.

With one of the most restrictive IP licensing scheme I've encountered in my professional life. Way to promote innovation indeed.

>Companies like SAP

At the risk of sounding sarcastic, I have a very hard time putting SAP and innovation in the same sentence. They're basically the Oracle of Germany.

> Green technologies and automotive is dominated by Germany.

I do not know enough about green tech to comment, but for automotive, I strongly disagree: incremental improvement, yes. Innovation? certainly not. Case in point: how many German company dominate in self-driving cars? All the German car makers are buying the tech. from elsewhere.

As a matter of fact, thanks for picking that example: where did Sebastian Thrun have to go in order for his ideas to take flight? Why did he not choose to do his thing in Germany?

>Overall I think Germany has plenty of risk taking engineers but the capital is more risk averse than in the US. Capital includes angel investors and pension funds and everything in between.

You are correct that Venture cap in Western Europe is risk averse. All they invest in is European versions of stuff that's already been proven successful in the US.

But what you're not seeing is that the aversion to risk from European VC is a symptom of a larger/deeper problem: statistically speaking, there is no appetite for risk and innovation in Europe. VC risk-averseness is just one facet of that.

And why should there be? Given the regulatory and tax burden you're going to be subjected to when you try to do anything over there, why even effing try?

> With one of the most restrictive IP licensing scheme I've encountered in my professional life. Way to promote innovation indeed.

Different business models are different, and things tend to get ugly when you find a way to print money.

I'll take the "restrictive licensing/patents" model over the Google/Facebook "private sector surveillance" model any day of the week...

> At the risk of sounding sarcastic, I have a very hard time putting SAP and innovation in the same sentence. They're basically the Oracle of Germany.

I think IBM might be a better comparison. Certainly the scale of the past century, both SAP and IBM did plenty of innovation.

> With one of the most restrictive IP licensing scheme I've encountered in my professional life. Way to promote innovation indeed.

I feel like you are moving goal posts. Also, do you think IP in the US software industry is any better?

No, I am not moving the goal posts.

Patents, while they were invented to promote it, end up being a major drag on innovation, which bears to my point: innovating in Europe is a major PITA.

>Also, do you think IP in the US software industry is any better

The way IP is managed in the US is terrible, granted.

But I would say that these days, and specifically for software, things are way better than they used to - say - in the 80's and 90's.

A number of tech. companies are starting to recognize that sharing IP is actually making them more money in the long run and are actually publishing a lot of what they invent.

For example, and while I am no fan of Google, they tend to open source a ton of non-obvious stuff (e.g. the recently discussed s2 library).

On the flipside, and as an experiment: if you work in a German tech. company, try and ask their legal dept how they'd feel about open-sourcing some of their stack. See what they say.

How much a tech company open sources their stuff depends much more on their industry sector. The web industry makes a lot Open Source. The embedded industry does not. Do General Motors, Boeing, or Tesla open source a lot?

My employer, Bosch, does open source a few things. For example: http://www.amalthea-project.org/

All car makers (not only the German ones) buy their tech from Bosch, another German company.

I'm talking about self-driving tech. Does Bosch makes that?

I personally know a couple of PhDs who worked at Bosch on self driving tech.

Yes: https://www.bosch-mobility-solutions.com/en/highlights/autom...

Working there. Doing that.

Accidentally, I just found this: Bosch had a self-driving van prototype in 1983. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY

I think you need to experience more European tech companies. Crazy and new ideas are very much appreciated here, but they also have to be funded, you can't just go hog wild and worry about the budget later.

>"Risk-taking, innovation, doing crazy "unthinkable" things is something that has simply deserted the European DNA a long time ago"

I dunno, just off the top of my head, I'm thinking about Spotify, Skype, Sitecore, Endomondo, Just-Eat, Unity, Tradeshift, Trustpilot, GoMore, Zendesk, TC Electronic, Soundboks, Navision, Vivino, and that's just Scandinavian and primarily Danish(-started) companies off the top of my head.

Perhaps your beef is more with German corporate/startup culture, and not European culture in general? We're very different from North to South, East to West :-)

>you can't just go hog wild and worry about the budget later.

Thank you for proving my point. A perfect example of why Europe is lagging in tech.

>Spotify, Skype, Sitecore, Endomondo, Just-Eat, Unity, Tradeshift, Trustpilot, GoMore, Zendesk, TC Electronic, Soundboks, Navision, Vivino

Leaving aside those that have already been bought out by a US-based corp, pray tell me: where in that list are the European Google, FB, Amazon, Apple, NVidia, Intel, TripAdvisor, etc... ?

Where are the European cell phone, CPU, memory, or for that matter computer manufacturers?

Of the list above, only - maybe - Spotify comes close to being able to play in the big boy's club.

Given the size of the European population, the amazing level of education of the population and the concentration of potential, the state of European innovation is nothing short of pitiful.

The root cause is Europeans live and a deeply arthritic societies where change is very rarely welcome.

Europe has less big tech companies but also less people shooting each other in the street or being homeless. I think the two are connected but that's a debate for another time...

> Europe has less big tech companies but also less people shooting each other in the street or being homeless.

Non sequitur of the century, bravo.

Sure, if you want to be irresponsible and damn the consequences, who cares who gets left behind or run off the road, then of course you can just go crazy. At some point someone is going to have to pick up the bill.

>"where in that list are the European Google, FB, Amazon, Apple, NVidia, Intel, TripAdvisor, etc... ?"

How convenient to only mention the extreme few who made it big. Never mind their predatory business practices, well-documented abuse of their employees, deep-seated government lobbying and massive total disregard for even basic customer privacy. They made it big, so they must be good, right?

>"Given the size of the European population, the amazing level of education of the population and the concentration of potential, the state of European innovation is pitiful.

The root cause is Europeans live and a deeply arthritic societies where change is very rarely welcome."

You seem to have an extremely biased and uncharitable view of Europe, for some reason, which I find troubling.

Unlike the US, we don't just dump our poor and destitute people on the streets to starve. "Move fast and break things" is not a healthy way to run a society.

>You seem to have an extremely biased and uncharitable view of Europe, for some reason, which I find troubling.

I've live very sizable chunks of my life in both the US and Europe, and I'm simply drawing comparisons.

Right now, when it comes to tech. Europe is basically lagging behind big time and my bet is it's only going to get worse. To be able to innovate, you need a certain mindset. That mindset mostly does not exist anymore in Europe.

This is not about uncharitable, it just makes me sad to see Europe as the ugly little duckling of the tech. world and unless folks in tech. in Europe stop telling themselves Gemütlichkeit fairy tales about the state of innovation there, it will only get worse.

>Unlike the US, we don't just dump our poor and destitute people on the streets to starve

This is a giant non-sequitur. What does this have to do with the way innovation is managed?

It's part of the "move fast and break things" mindset that seems extremely prevalent in the US tech industry in particular, but certainly also in other parts of society. Just charge on, who cares about those who get left by the wayside, if they end up in a bad situation, it was probably their own fault for not working hard enough.

Like I said, it's a very troubling mindset to apply to running a country.

You have a lucky few who make great progress, but at what cost?

> Almost all the important technical inventions of the 20th century happened outside Europe.

Evidence please?

To name a few minor ones:

- The transistor

- The computer

- Atomic energy

- The search engine

- The internet

Shall I go on?

Those had many Europeans on their teams, specially German researchers, while Europe was busy recovering from WW II.

>Those had many Europeans on their teams, specially German researchers

Thank you for proving my point.

I never said Europeans were bad engineers, far from it.

I'm saying they leave because it's just impossible to innovate in Europe, and that's a major problem.

You skipped over

> while Europe was busy recovering from WW II.

Many of those inventions started here during WW II.

Also innovation is not only IT stuff, I bet many in US enjoy being treated with Bayer medicine, stuffing their house with IKEA furniture, doing games in Unity, talking with their friends over Skype, having a mobile phone that one can easily swap out a SIM card, ....

None of the stuff you list is in any way a "major" tech innovation.

That's all Europe has produced in tech. in the last 70 years: crumbs off the table.

And it's not going to get any better: whatever WW-II based explanation you may provide to justify the current state of affairs, it's not a solution to the problem.

The problem is that European innovators operate in a hostile environment.

If they stay, it cripples them.

If they're smart enough to realize this, they leave and go to a place where they can be successful.

Not all of those happened exclusively outside of Europe - there was some parallel development in Europe as well (transistor, computers). The transistor was independently developed in France shortly before the public announcement by Bell Labs. And the arguable first working "modern" digital computer (programmable, fully automated, using floating point) was the Z3 in 1941 (which started the Zuse KG, a computer hardware company, which lasted until ~1970).

And most of the first few search engines were based in Europe (mostly Geneva).. and you might also have heard of a small invention out of CERN that you are using right now..

I'm very sorry, but it's hard not to laugh at this list ... and to try and be objective: these examples make my point even stronger.

None of the folks who may or may not have been the first to invent these things in Europe managed to exploit the economic potential of what they had invented.

It is a deeply sad commentary of how much of bright people's potential is utterly pissed down the drain every day in Europe.

Oh, also, you forgot to mention that the French invented the internet first (t'was called the minitel).

The minitel was a perfect example of a government-run tech. program: 10 years after it was launched, it was still operating at the original speed of 300 bps.

One of very many brilliant ideas left to rot on the altar of socialist-run centralized western europe societies.

> and to try and be objective: these examples make my point even stronger.

Maybe you forgot, but you claimed that almost all the important technical innovations of the 20th century happened outside of Europe. When asked for evidence you produced a list, which includes innovations that were developed in parallel in Europe as well (or even predate the development outside of Europe).

Or is your argument that only who ends up winning in the end (by some arbitrary metric) is the true inventor of some technology?

So how exactly does it make your point stronger?

> None of the folks who may or may not have been the first to invent these things in Europe managed to exploit the economic potential of what they had invented.

By all accounts the Zuse KG did quite well for a few decades, before a few questionable business decisions ended it (and it was bought out by Siemens). But initially he indeed was able to exploit it's commercial potential (in fact he was the first person to do so..).

> It is a deeply sad commentary of how much of bright people's potential is utterly pissed down the drain every day in Europe.

And that's not the case in the US..? And exactly how or why is this happening here and not in the US?

Fair point about Minitel, but that doesn't translate into all aspects of technology.. far from it.

When I talk about innovation, I don't just mean having ideas or inventing things.

Without falling into clichés, having ideas is the easy part. And, TBH, who gives two hoots about who had an idea first as compared to the guy who has the idea and takes it to a planet-sized success?

Getting something to work and then into a commercially viable operation is what I am talking about when I talk about innovation.

I don't doubt there's plenty of German or French or whatever with brilliant ideas. But 10 years later that's all they are: ideas. Or they are taken over by others and grown into what they need to be.

Innovation is about having the right idea and making it take off.

All the important technical innovations in the 20th century - as in: those who have had a sizable impact on humanity, happened outside Europe.

Completely true that having the idea is the easy part. But you are missing a few steps between having the idea and world domination..

> Getting something to work and then into a commercially viable operation is what I am talking about when I talk about innovation.

Which the Zuse KG was for the (early) Computer.

Still - you are using innovation in a different way to most people. Most people don't have the global domination requirement. This very much seems like moving the goal posts to me.

> All the important technical innovations in the 20th century - as in: those who have had a sizable impact on humanity, happened outside Europe.

Now that is completely false, since the arguable most important technical innovation (by impact) of the 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process, was invented in Germany. And the WWW also had quite an impact I would argue..

Never mind more subtle things, like industrial control systems (where Siemens has taken it global) and industrial machines in general (which is also an quite successful area). Things outside the Internet still exist and still have an impact on humanity.

And you haven't answered how the potential of bright people is currently being pissed away in Europe today.

Here's a quick selection, excuse my partisanship, I couldn't find an equivalent list for specifically European innovation:

Antibiotics - British

Tank - British

Television - at least shared by Britain and others

Stereo audio - British

Computer - critical aspects conceptualised and realised in Britain

Jet engine - largely German/English

Radar - largely British

Maglev - British

Hovercraft - British

Float glass process - British

Carbon fibre - British

Liquid Crystal (or at least a critical step) - British

RSA encryption - British

World wide web - British

SMS - British

Shall I go on?

The list is mostly from a country that's not exactly in Europe anymore ;)

[edit] I should have been more specific and said that I didn't include the Brits in when I think of flagging innovation in western Europe. The focus was on Germany and to some extent the countries directly around it.

That being said: not a single union jack in sight in the page below ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...

You have to get down to #28 to find one in this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...

And that's the key: however inventive folks from a given country may be, if the socio-economic system they operate in does impede innovation (and TBH I don't know enough about your island to comment about that), then all of these great ideas are for naught, they end up benefiting others.

Getting into semantics now, but I think entrepreneurialism is perhaps better than innovation, since innovation is not exclusive to business situations. But even then I still have difficulty with what you say about innovation though - tech companies are just one area of business! Germany is the world's third largest exporter, with much of its exports containing cutting edge technology designed and manufactured in Germany, but apparently that doesn't count as innovation in your mind as its not on the Internet?