Startup Europe: Encode Expertise. Build on Science.

In a world where AI can ship a passable product in a weekend, Europe’s advantage isn’t speed. It’s depth: hard science and domain expertise translated into usable systems.

The uncomfortable truth

Two gravitational centres dominate technology today. The US scales capital, platforms, and distribution with ruthless efficiency. China compresses cycles and out-iterates in hardware and manufacturing. In that pincer, Europe will not win by moving faster on the same game board, or by producing yet another “AI agent” that can be replicated by anyone with an API key.

What Europe does have is a density of expert knowledge: physics, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, materials, energy systems; plus hospitals, labs, and industrial suppliers where real constraints live. That is not a pity prize. In the age of AI, depth is defensibility.

Why “experts-first” beats “entrepreneurship-first”

A popular European reflex is to teach “entrepreneurship” as a standalone discipline and celebrate company creation as the end in itself. That made sense when shipping digital apps was hard. It is less useful now that AI automates large chunks of building, from code to copy to customer support.

Entrepreneurship is a method, not a substitute for expertise. When the problem space includes clinical risk, grid stability, or materials behaviour, the advantage goes to founders who have already done the hard yards as doctors, physicists, chemical engineers, or operators, and then learn to productise.

The result is not “slower”; it’s sharper:

• Cleaner problem framing. Experts start from constraints (safety, latency, auditability) rather than backfitting them later.
• Higher trust surface. Regulators, buyers, and practitioners adopt faster when the decision points match real-world workflows.
• Harder to copy. You can copy a feature; you cannot cheaply copy 10 years of tacit knowledge and the judgement encoded in it.