Where is European Creativity Heading?
When comparing European growth with the US and Asia one can wonder where European creativity and innovation is heading.
The combined EU economy is by far the world’s largest and the European economic zone is generally populated with well-educated
and creative citizens. Furthermore, the shift in the production base from the Western economies to Asia, the emphasis on the
knowledge society has even greater significance in terms of both innovation and transpiration. So why isn’t European innovation
translate into economic growth?
The idea of European diversity as a driver for creativity is becoming ever more popular with the
celebration of the successful integration of European economies vis-à-vis the preservation of national heritage and cultural
diversity of the European nations. However, when the talk falls upon the integration of European innovation the picture is that
Europe to a wide extend still is a collection of nation states where collaboration stops at the national border.
However, if one
looks really careful at the locus of innovation one will quickly see that networks of innovation are typically very strongly
interlaced at the regional level and that the linkages are very weak when it comes to interlacing networks of innovation within
national borders. Seemingly, innovation tends to occur in local clusters, which changes the level of competition and technology
exchange from the national to the regional level.
Still, the national borders symbolise real challenges to the transpiration of
technological innovations and exchange of technology through partnerships and alliances on a cross-regional level. As such, the
European market is not yet a reality in true terms when it comes to partnering and transgression beyond the regional economic zones.
Language, legislation, culture and the natural deviation towards historical economic linkages and networks shows, once the
interlacing of clusters across the national border in Europe is mapped. Consequently, innovation in Europe is still local,
which accounts for a vast waste of resources on parallel innovation processes, and in areas such as the missing out on economies
of scale. But most significantly, the diversity of innovation in Europe, which should be the advantage of the European economic
zone, does not transcend beyond the regional and national borders to create synergies across the European economy. This is perhaps
the major challenge for the future of European creativity.