Germany, the United Kingdom, and France are Europe's largest economies. Despite their geographical proximity (France and Germany share a border, while the U.K. is only a short train ride from France through the English Channel), and regardless of the European Union's efforts to homogenize its political and economic environment, the three countries are and will remain fundamentally different in culture, business environment, and government philosophy.
The following section portrays three regions , or locations, within these countries struggling to adapt to the global Innovation Economy in their own, distinctly different ways. Regardless of their differences, Munich, Cambridge, and Sophia Antipolis share the fact that the rapid rise of new ways of creating regional wealth around the world has forced them to learn a new culture of entrepreneurship and to build environments in which this new culture would be able to prosper . With their long traditions of large industrial economies, Germany, France, and the U.K. each face the challenge of forcing change into their existing economic and political structures. Regardless of considerable achievements, their economies still appear slow and cumbersome when compared with the dynamic drive of Silicon Valley, which has proven capable of constantly reinventing itself.
It is in these countries' struggles to adapt to business-culture norms such as openness and flexibility, and dismantling bureaucracy and hierarchy, that we can best see that attitudes in business are as important as capital investment in making a successful transition to the global Innovation Economy. The contrast with Ireland, for example, which achieved greater growth of foreign direct investment than their much larger industrialized neighbors, illustrates that competitive advantage is no longer based only on comparative size and resources.
The limited success at creating these environments in geographic pockets of their countries, however, proves once again that there is no magic formula for the creation of regional wealth in a global high-tech economy. The following chapters confirm that regions and companies cannot simply copy what has been successfully accomplished within another regional environment. While the global Innovation Economy may indeed imply global standards and global business cultures, each region's process of transformation to this model remains unique, necessitating unique approaches, initiatives, and policies to achieve successful results.
Different Roles of Government with Business Partnerships
The regions covered in this section each approach development differently. While a critical mass of large and diverse technology companies and state research institutions form the basis of Munich's high-tech environment, the environment in Cambridge has been created almost solely around its 700-year-old, world-class university. Sophia Antipolis, on the other hand, was created "from scratch" as a technology park amid the rolling hills of Southern France, which was well known for its tourism, but had no real intellectual or industrial heritage. While in France, the government has traditionally been "right in the middle," driving and channeling high-tech development, government policy in the Munich region has aimed to create initial sparks and then to leave development up to the forces of the market. In Cambridge, there is a clear rejection of the government by local high-tech entrepreneurs. The government here is expected merely to remove barriers and then to get out of the way of economic developments. As different as these approaches may be, the entrepreneurship cultures they are promoting all seem to point in a similar direction, encouraging individual initiative, creativity, the taking of risks, and an international and interdisciplinary exposure to enable groundbreaking new technology innovations.
