ABSTRACT

High-tech entrepreneurship is all the rage in Europe these days. The French have established a high-powered ministry that will make the encouragement of high-tech entrepreneurship a top government priority. The West Germans are starting up venture-capital firms on the United States model and are talking of having their own Silicon Tal, or valley. They have even coined a new word—Unternehmer-Kultur (entrepreneurial culture)—and are busy writing learned papers and holding symposia on it. Even the British are proposing government aid to new high-tech enterprises in fields such as semiconductors, biotechnology, or telecommunications.