I suspect it is actually a great strength of Europe that the attitude towards regulation (to put it perhaps overly simplistically, favoring more intangible rights over economic growth) precludes hype and bubble phenomena like the mentioned "creation of large, integrated data sets" or "young, innovative tech companies". This means that business, at least to some extent, is forced to address real-world issues and work at a more local level. What is seen as "innovative" in the US is typically merely rent-seeking or parasitic on the broader society, and it seems likely that slower, more measured growth is consistent with better outcomes overall.

It is also curious to me that the US and China are seen as examples of what to aim for, rather than as cautionary tales of what can happen with an excessive focus on growth. It is not clear to me that the general happiness of people in the US or China exceeds that of people in Europe. On the contrary, it seems that those two countries are almost constantly dealing with some horrible externality of unbridled focus on stock prices, revenues, growth etc, to the detriment of the broader social good. Housing crises, homelessness, rampant privacy violations, the expansion of police states to maintain the boundary between haves and have-nots, debt crises, long working hours and bad conditions — these are all phenomena that seem more prevalent in countries with a higher focus on "competitiveness". What good does it do a middle-class worker to make twice the absolute salary when they are spending half of it correcting for the deficiencies of their society?