Hi Nicklas, this is an interesting and surprising take on the application advantage hypothesis as a competitive Europe strategy. As a signal startups building AI agents in Europe picked up almost half a billion EUR in the first six weeks of 2025 alone.
I liked the Gutenberg example as a classic. The Japanese story is well known and is struggling to renew itself. Thinking of it, even the traditional Norwegian commodity-based industries have an element of the application advantage approach (combined with nature-based advantages): Offshore oil and gas — technology from the US, fish farming — based on development from France and the UK, and even whaling first adopted from the US, then Norwegians combined the weapons with steam engines — almost driving the whales extinct…
Recently, the close-to-complete electrification of mobility, from cars to public transport, to construction work and machinery in the main cities, has for other reasons nearly been a lost case with very little innovation and value creation coming out of it. Except for a few examples of charging technologies, public procurement innovations, and some trailblazing construction sites. This is more due to the low innovation focus in Norway at the moment.
Europe has a natural leading advantage in attractive cities, an outstanding — and the only — history of coping with both democratic models and their inherent revolutions, and historically leading city government models. As application advantage innovation in combination with globally leading public city services, together with renewed “citizen contracts”, could become global role models and “export-article” of public-private innovations.
These are excellent points and the role of the citizen is a subject I want to return to - I do think we underestimate the importance of active participation in democracy vastly.
Thanks for this post! I fully agree that by now, it seems obvious that the old "me too" innovation model where the EU just re-invents what was successful elsewhere has failed. The diffusion model is promising, I think, and on my own Substack, I will publish some thoughts about how such an EU tech policy "flywheel" could look like :-) You also made a good point on regulation: The quality of regulation probably is more relevant than how much regulation we have but I think GDPR is a point in case here: There are many examples where core principles of GDPR are simply not clear even seven years after it came into force and this of course creates uncertainty in businesses that prevent the rapid uptake of new technologies that rely on or work with personal data (and then there's many laws that do not simply have a few gaps but are badly written from the start ...).
Hi Nicklas, this is an interesting and surprising take on the application advantage hypothesis as a competitive Europe strategy. As a signal startups building AI agents in Europe picked up almost half a billion EUR in the first six weeks of 2025 alone.
I liked the Gutenberg example as a classic. The Japanese story is well known and is struggling to renew itself. Thinking of it, even the traditional Norwegian commodity-based industries have an element of the application advantage approach (combined with nature-based advantages): Offshore oil and gas — technology from the US, fish farming — based on development from France and the UK, and even whaling first adopted from the US, then Norwegians combined the weapons with steam engines — almost driving the whales extinct…
Recently, the close-to-complete electrification of mobility, from cars to public transport, to construction work and machinery in the main cities, has for other reasons nearly been a lost case with very little innovation and value creation coming out of it. Except for a few examples of charging technologies, public procurement innovations, and some trailblazing construction sites. This is more due to the low innovation focus in Norway at the moment.
Europe has a natural leading advantage in attractive cities, an outstanding — and the only — history of coping with both democratic models and their inherent revolutions, and historically leading city government models. As application advantage innovation in combination with globally leading public city services, together with renewed “citizen contracts”, could become global role models and “export-article” of public-private innovations.
Thanks.
These are excellent points and the role of the citizen is a subject I want to return to - I do think we underestimate the importance of active participation in democracy vastly.
Thanks for this post! I fully agree that by now, it seems obvious that the old "me too" innovation model where the EU just re-invents what was successful elsewhere has failed. The diffusion model is promising, I think, and on my own Substack, I will publish some thoughts about how such an EU tech policy "flywheel" could look like :-) You also made a good point on regulation: The quality of regulation probably is more relevant than how much regulation we have but I think GDPR is a point in case here: There are many examples where core principles of GDPR are simply not clear even seven years after it came into force and this of course creates uncertainty in businesses that prevent the rapid uptake of new technologies that rely on or work with personal data (and then there's many laws that do not simply have a few gaps but are badly written from the start ...).