Guidewire Group - A Social Media Enterprise: Where is Europe's Garage?

Where is Europe's Garage?

On a quiet tree-lined street in Palo Alto, California, you can stroll by the modest address where William Hewlett and David Packard worked together to start the company that is now known worldwide as HP. Indeed, the tiny garage at 367 Addison Avenue, designated by an historical marker as the ''birthplace of Silicon Valley,” is for many the symbol of innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship in the United States.

While Hewlett and Packard were not the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, they are no doubt the best known, in the U.S. and around the world. They have been followed by Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and countless other, lesser-known entrepreneurs. Today, it is not uncommon to refer to the early days of any technology company as “just two guys in a garage.”

As much as the garage on Addison Avenue represents entrepreneurship, however, it also represents an ecosystem that came alive to help these two men and those that followed build world-class companies. Along with Hewlett and Packard, names like Kleiner, Perkins, Wilson, Sonsini, Silicon Valley Bank, Regis McKenna, and hundreds of other investors, bankers, lawyers, and professionals that work with struggling startups to accelerate their march to success. This “Innovation Ecosystem” works together in the world’s richest IT marketplace to build the products and companies that drive the U.S. and, increasingly, the global economy forward.

This ecosystem is vital to any technology market, and as we look to Europe, we must ask: “Where is the garage?” “Where is the ecosystem?” Indeed, Europe’s research parks, universities, and institutions are ripe with innovation. Yet the ecosystem which surrounds the development, launch and commercialization of innovative technology products is highly fragmented across Europe.

This is the innovation challenge for Europe in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and why Guidewire Group is hosting Innovate!Europe. Innovate!Europe is the first executive-level conference focused exclusively on highlighting, supporting, and celebrating European-originated technology innovation, and uniting an ecosystem to transform technology innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe. We invite you to join us in Zaragoza, Spain, June 13 – 15, 2005 to take your place in this ecosystem of innovation. To learn more, visit http://www.innovate-events.com.

While many suggest that a pan-European technology market cannot be created from the fractured collection of country markets, we believe that a pan-European tech market must be created in order to build a strong innovation center -- in distinct European countries and across European country borders. Failure to bridge markets into a European technology powerhouse will stifle European economies in an increasingly global technology market. Without a large, attractive market base in Europe, technology companies in North American and Asia will bypass European sectors and look to one another as global technology trade partners, focusing on the large, and by comparison homogeneous, markets that each region offers the other.

Posted by Guidewire Group at April 12, 2005 01:19 PM

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Where is Europe's Garage?

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