I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not less creation. What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main rea

I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not less creation. What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main reasons: 1) Europeans are less likely to make it a business - the safety net might play a role but also just different value sets. I'd suggest that on average Europeans are less focused on profit/getting rich and more on just living a decent life e.g. with work-life balance. So they might run things in their spare time but will be more likely to give their creation away than run a for-profit company with it. See e.g. PGP, Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, OpenCloud & Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ... - many leading FOSS and even some hardware projects are European-lead. 2) Startup success is quite a bit more difficult in Europe due to lower investor/VC availability and a smaller market (burden of translation & different legislations, although EU legislation is slowly converging things). Nonetheless you had Skype, Spotify, TransferWise, etc. But those were all mostly bootstrapped - there's no money available that allows annual 8-or-9-digit losses like with the typical examples of Uber, Lyft, WeWork or Lime. So its not that there's nothing creative going on, but fewer try to make it a business and of those fewer succeed - and indeed many of those are then bought by or on their own move to the other side of the Atlantic. Tidbit: actually I've never seen comparison data on startup success rates between countries, just on overall startup numbers.