Analysis: IT Weaknesses in GREECE

If Europe, with telecommunications network costs anywhere from twice to 10 times as expensive as America's, agressively deregulates state-run telecommunications monopolies and accelerates the European Union's economic integration, then perhaps the continent will only be, say, seven years behind the United States. Unfortunately for Greece, its lack of global computational competitiveness is more a function of their commercial culture and its heavy-handed heritage of government interventions. The problem is not that the Europeans lack the wit or technical fluency to be brilliant innovators. The much-hyped and heralded World Wid Web on the Internet wasn't created by clever Silicon Valley geeks. It was created by scientists at CERN, the Swiss-based European center of high-energy particle physics.(26)

The World Wide Web was a sensational achievement, but it was American software entrepreneurs and American companies that have successfully figured out how to make money off the web. Greece's challange is not a shortage of intelligent individuals or a surfeit of clever bureaucrats. It has a shortage of both public and private institutions capable of swiftly and profitably creating and commercializing digital innovations. Europe as a whole doesn't have America's infrastructure of venture capital. Its technical universities seem incapable of spinning off new enterprises, and the fragmented culture and economies make it difficult to create strategic relationships with customers. EU president Jacques Santer appropriately states, "Europeans must be the drivers, designers,constructors, content providers and financiers of the global information society, and not hitchhikers stuck on the side of the information highway."

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Last Update:October 30, 1995

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