> it's not driving innovation and we don't really need to emulate it.
Then don't emulate it and the US will continue to own nearly everything in tech that isn't inside of China.
I've been reading sentiment like that out of Europe for over two decades now, with predictable results that just keep going around in a circle and getting the Europeans nowhere.
SV and the US tech industry are great at creating markets as well, which you entirely ignore. What did the global cloud services market look like before AWS built it (even Alibaba's cloud offering is a mere intentional clone of AWS)? In terms of sales it barely existed. Every major tech market has been established by SV money and US tech companies, not European companies.
There's no evidence that Europe has been more innovative with their approach. It's quite the opposite given the vast majority of major technologies have come out of the US dating back to the 1950s. Europe's contributions pale by comparison, and that's why their companies pale by comparison.
Even ARM - one of Europe's few innovators in tech - had to be started by two US companies, with one of the partner companies being European. It's only fitting the US own that company again considering.
The leader in AI and quantum computing is the US, with China a close second, and Europe a distant third. And if you narrow that down to the EU, it's even worse now that Britain has left.
And when it comes to scaling, you get things like vast numbers of lucrative jobs, high paying engineering salaries from creating global giants. You get an immense virtuous cycle from it, including for seed funding start-ups and larger VC activities. Microsoft will grow its revenue more in the next two years than the total size of SAP (which is Europe's largest softare company and most valuable tech company). The revenue gap between them used to be more like 3 to 1 (circa 2001), now it's over 5 to 1 and persistently expanding.
AWS is on its way to being an $80-$100 billion sales global juggernaut, while SAP runs in slow motion. There's no reason Europe couldn't have done that, in theory; in practice, it has been two decades and Europe hasn't been able to do it.
"Innovation" is a gloriously worthless word (you can tell because Bill Gates was so very fond of throwing it around while he was at Microsoft, it's a dodge word). If something can't be supported with actual results, people jump to proclaiming things about innovation or the lack of it.
Besides, where is the supposed innovation in Europe's tech scene over the last four or five decades? What innovation? Where are the hundreds of amazing, innovative, successful European tech companies that are supposed to stand as a counter to Silicon Valley & Co.? They don't exist. Europeans will claim that's because they're all being acquired by richer US tech companies, which is false; that certainly happens occasionally, and it's happening at a small scale, because there aren't very many of those companies to purchase.