The EU needs to completely start over somehow.
did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies?
tencent, alibaba, baidu
"According to the Wall Street Journal, investments by Chinese VCs now represent 40 percent of the worldwide total (Silicon Valley still leads the field at 44 percent [edit: this puts Europe at 12% at most]) and China’s share is 15 times greater than in 2013.
VC investment in China grew by 3,000 percent – from 1.1 billion dollars to 34.1 billion dollars – between 2006 and 2016, with the fastest growth occurring between 2013 and 2016 (up to 2013, average VC investment in China was 4.3 billion dollars a year). This rate of growth continued after 2016.
Chinese startups attracted more VC money than their American counterparts – 56 billion dollars as opposed to 42 billion dollars – for the first time in the first half of 2018. However, that has not proved to be all good news. Due to the availability of VC money, and pressure by owners and shareholders of VC funds to invest,even less promising startups can secure funding relatively easily in China."
[1] https://www.netherlandsworldwide.nl/countries/china/startup-...
This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen.
While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.
How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth.
The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.
(European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).