In many ways the European model of starting companies is a waterfall model - that is, progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards - there’s no going back and changing your goals when you’ve learned new stuff about your business.

I’m not saying that every company is started like that, but that that’s how the existing big companies have come to be. It’s still a part of culture, even though small startups are beginning to change that perception. In Europe the culture seems to be that big companies are willed into existence by the government as a public-private partnership when a need has been identified by the bureaucrats and political leaders. The goals are clear, and design happens after the money is on the table and an initial committee of experts has been recruited. All that’s left to do is build the product and company. That’s the way the numerous telecoms, postal services, the austrian mineral oil authority or Volkswagen and most other big european corporations have come to be.

It comes natural to governments to try and apply the same model to the new companies that are needed to compete in today’s information economy.

Good examples that this is in fact happening are the Theseus project (€250 Million from French and German governments to build a semantic search engine), and the Quaero project (€90 Million from the French Government to build a multimedia search engine). Bureaucrats learned from Google that search is a big deal, and now want their own search engine. Wheels started turning and thus they recruited a team to build them one.

Note that there’s no Entrepreneur in the picture: People are placed in these newly-formed projects mainly through nepotism and reputation. Landing a good position in such a company can be the entry-ticket to becoming part of other committees, and thus a start into a good and stable career. Individuals aren’t incentivized at all to care if the project succeeds (would a government-owned european search engine really change the global economy?) - just having been there is enough to get on more committees and projects on the future. 

Compare this to the startup approach, where a bunch of people get together with a rough idea of what markets they want to tackle and then just get started. HP’s business plan famously contained the sentence “The question of what to manufacture was postponed until later in the discussion”. It’s not that the product doesn’t matter - in fact the incentives of the founders are much more strongly aligned (running out of money, most likely their own) with having to find something that works, than in any other known scenario.

It’s just that the long-term value of the organizations isn’t really in its assets anymore, but in the capability of the organization to try new stuff and adapt. It’s not so much about choosing the right thing to do, but about being able to throw stuff at the wall, and see if something sticks, before you run out of stuff to throw.

Hacker Culture is all about trying stuff. Iterate fast, fail fast, and try again. Hacker Culture is Entrepreneur Culture in its essence. European culture is still stuck in the delusion of actually being able to control things. Just cherry-pick the right decisions and you’ll succeed, so goes the thinking. The entrepreneurship culture in the States with its ideal of giving everyone a shot at trying, and not punishing failure seems much closer to the hacker culture that’s needed to build meaningful companies for the times to come. Before Europe will get its own tech startups of meaningful size, a huge change of culture is needed. I see hackerspaces as a way to bootstrap a culture that is more open to try new things - or rather live it right now.