Good old American ingenuity? Not quite; the Europeans might just be eating our technological lunch.
Actually, it's all of Europe that's coming, not just my U.K. friends. There's a tidal wave of activity across the pond these days and, for a change, the Europeans are leading the way in a lot of areas.
First, let's look at why it's suddenly attractive to be in Belgium opening a tech company when previously the only reason to be there was your fetish for beer made by monks. The exit money in tech startups has only really been on our shores--mostly in the NASDAQ. The fact that the market tanked and venture capitalists had to get second jobs at the local retail store meant there was no real inherent value the U.S. brought to entrepreneurs other than perhaps a larger talent pool to pull from. That excuse has drawn to a close with the Europeans spending huge amounts of money teaching their young how to acquire the skills necessary to compete in the technology world. They slowly began offering U.S. companies outsourced manufacturing services a few years ago--for example, Ireland gave U.S. companies tax-free status if they manufactured over there--and in the meantime provided valuable jobs to a whole lot of folks. Numerous other countries followed suit. In a way, what the U.S. did for the European Union in the technology space is just what we did for the Japanese in the auto industry--we showed them how to beat us at our own game and then became their best consumer.
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