there is a long history of such government initiatives laying the starting seed for high tech industry development However, not in the EU. The EU has been enga

there is a long history of such government initiatives laying the starting seed for high tech industry development However, not in the EU. The EU has been engaging in massive subsidisation for decades and has little to show for it. In some places it seems to have led to a hollowed out society in which companies that are supposedly startups spend all their time chasing grant money instead of building real products. VC investment is hard work. The EU isn't a well run VC firm even though it deploys more capital than such firms do, and it shows: they don't really care what the money gets spent on as long as there's a paper trail they can use to do ass-covering if it turns out the money was lost to fraud. So it creates this USSR-like culture of zombie firms that can't really survive independent of state funding.