[registration] As Europe’s economy recovers, companies and investors across the continent are gearing up for new opportunities, taking advantage of its hidden strengths: education, skills and innovative people. Here we look at plans by the EU’s science and research chief to ensure European companies thrive in the internet’s “third wave”.

Europe’s expertise in engineering and science should enable it to dominate the “internet of things”, according to the EU’s science and research chief. But Carlos Moedas admits the bloc’s companies were slow to grasp the rise of the app-based digital economy.

“We missed it,” he says, referring to the success of Silicon Valley and companies such as Google and Facebook in developing services that have transformed the lives of European consumers.

European companies’ relative absence from the digital transformation of recent years represents a strategic failure, says Mr Moedas. It is also a reversal from the success of previous decades, when European pioneers such as worldwide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and companies such as Nokia and Siemens helped lay “the backbone of the internet”.
https://www.ft.com/content/a8fdd43a-d5bd-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9