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Europe’s chance and how to embrace it

At DLD 2025, I had the pleasure to have Francesco Sciortino, the co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, on stage. The title of our panel was „Game-changing Engineering“.  We chose this headline to discuss and showcase the power of machine-learning based, simulation-driven engineering and how it will change the world of engineering. With his concise team of engineers, some of whom come from Formula 1 teams, he has managed to design and test hundreds of thousands of different versions of the stellarator for fusion energy within just 18 months.

Another important aspect Francesco Sciortino mentioned, is their approach towards manufacturing. There are numerous manufacturing and production skills and facilities across Europe, many of them underutilised. Francesco Sciortino spoke about his vision of a networked production. While they invest heavily into R&D and simulation-driven engineering, they will also leverage existing manufacturing know-how in Europe. As such, Proxima Fusion signed a partnership with Bilfinger Noell to leverage its experience and skills to build complex magnet systems and special machines for fusion.

You wish and hope that brilliant entrepreneurs like Francesco Sciortino who deliberately decide to start their businesses in Europe, succeed at maximum scale. There are so many other examples of brilliant founders and talent in Europe. In late 2024, Ian Hogarth asked the question “Can Europe build its first trillion-dollar start-up?” and responded that the EU first needs to solve a lack of experienced founders, a lack of ‘audacious capital’, and excessive US buyouts. Pieter Garicano in his post “Failure Cost”, which was meant to be an answer to Ian Hogarth’s article, cited a paper by Olivier Coste and Yann Coatanlem that argues that “the reason more capital doesn’t flow towards high-leverage ideas in Europe is because the price of failure is too high. These costs kick in when a major venture has failed; it follows that the higher the probability of failure in a sector, the greater the relative disadvantage for Europe. The lack of repeat founders and ‘audacious’ venture capital are symptoms of this underlying malady.”

The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition. Europe has many talented researchers and entrepreneurs filing patents. In terms of filed patent applications, Europe is not far behind the US and Japan while China outperformed the US by 3x in 2023. Innovation is also not blocked at the next stage when it comes to translating innovation into commercialization. Europe has fantastic university programmes for this translation such as UnternehmerTUM in Munich and many others -150 in total- that were listed by the Financial Times in its Europe’s leading start-up hubs ranking 2025.

When thinking through Hogarth’s original question, “Can Europe build its first trillion-dollar start-up?”, I think that there is one other very important and fundamental aspect that we should consider: European venture businesses must get much bigger much faster. We have to think more European, more in terms of the “Airbus” idea, particularly in capital-intense industries such as artificial intelligence, fusion energy, quantum or space tech. We need more Europeans uniting behind the most promising teams rather than national competition for capital and talent within Europe. This means that we should aim for consolidation of venture businesses much earlier in those sectors than we are used to, potentially already at a very early stage. That way, venture companies become more competitive for large tickets from both key accounts and investors. AI is the future of intellectual property, which is at the core of democracy and the modern economy. Hence, AI sovereignty should not have a defensive touch, but it is key for European corporations to have control over their data and the AI capabilities they need to be able to shape their future. Arguably, fusion energy, quantum and space-tech fall into the same category where sovereignty for Europe really matters and is existential for Europe.

Just weeks after this year’s DLD, the EU presented its idea for the “28th regime”. These proposed legal frameworks of European Union rules are not designed to replace member states’ own national rules but are an optional alternative to them. It aims to foster an innovation-friendly environment that makes it simpler and faster for European innovative startups to grow and scale up in a single European market.

Early consolidation, along with the EU’s planned ’28th regime,’ could propel Europe towards more sustainable global competitiveness and enable it to play a more significant role globally.

sandra-stock.adobe.com

Another renaissance of advertising images?

At the turn of the 20th century, technical progress in the field of mechanics and rail transport resulted in a renaissance of advertising images. Speed and exceptionalism were perfectly suited for experimenting with color and design, with increasingly original and contrasting shapes and ever more attractive motives.

In this example, a car manufactured by Automobiles Brasier is scenically emerging from a colourful tornado. The driver wears racing glasses and is avoiding the head wind, the passengers at his side is hanging onto a hat, afraid it will fly off with the sheer speed of the car.

This scenario is the work of Leonetto Cappiello (1875 – 1942), a leading poster artist who was famous for his rather spectacular posters and is often considered as the father of modern advertising. Cappiello who mainly lived and worked in Paris, generally used colors to create his effects, but most often than not, something bizarre creates these effects rather than perfectly harmonious colors. So promoting a fashionable car means using a car traveling at a high speed, driving straight at us in a rainbow of colored dust.

I am curious what impact AI and the descriptive nature of LLMs and image generating tools will have on advertising images in the near and midterm future, over 100 years after the poster art emerged in the early years of the 20th century. Are we approaching another fundamental renaissance of advertising images?