There is a great momentum building in the European and global technology markets. Entrepreneurship is flourishing, and the infrastructure to build and support young companies is improving daily. Where last year, we gathered in Zaragoza to discuss the challenges in the Innovation Ecosystem, this year, we celebrate the successes. Certainly, many challenges remain. Still, as you heard from the speakers and saw in the companies at Innovate!Europe, this marketplace has moved very far, very fast.

Eleven months ago, investors, entrepreneurs, public officials, customers, and service providers came to Zaragoza to talk about the challenges in the innovation ecosystem. There was a lot to talk about, too:

• Were the engines of innovation running properly?
• How could small European startups really compete in a global marketplace?
• Could they effectively commercialize the technologies they were inventing?
• What were investors thinking?
• Were the large platform providers really offering a hand up to early stage companies?
• Could entrepreneurs – and investors, for that matter – overcome the cultural and social stigmas regarding risk and even success?

These were big questions and we bravely took them on in wonderfully interactive discussions where the lines between the stage and the audience blurred so that ideas and comments could be debated among all the delegates. And finally, we put all this thinking into the white paper which by now many of you have downloaded and read.

Now, 11 months later, we returned to Zaragoza, but this time, we were not wringing our hands and wondering why the innovation ecosystem wasn’t working as effectively as it could. We were not standing in the shadow of the US market or the emerging Chinese power house.

At this second edition of Innovate!Europe, we were here to celebrate.

We celebrate progress . . . In just a very short space of time, Europe has emerged as – yes, believe it – a technology startup power house. Sure, the rate of entrepreneurship does not yet equal that in North America on an absolute basis, but entrepreneurship is rapidly growing and perhaps even outstripping the US on a relative basis.

Without question, in the past 11 months, I have seen more and better small companies coming out of Europe than I have seen the previous 10 years combined. It has – almost – become fashionable to be an entrepreneur in Europe today. The cultural stigmas, while not gone completely, and fading quickly.

What’s happened? For starters, a great many of the innovating entrepreneurs creating and riding the European startup wave have come out of university in the past few years. They have grown up knowing computers from their earliest days. Many can barely remember dial-up networking; broadband connectivity is almost always taken for granted. Best of all, most of these young entrepreneurs have heard cautionary tales of the Internet crash of 2000, but few really experienced it.

For this generation, building companies is a natural act. They aren’t defying custom or eschewing lifetime jobs so much as embracing their exciting ideas and working to bring them to reality.

Indeed, we have reached a cultural turning point at which entrepreneurship drives new social and economic growth.

We celebrate a global market . . . Companies coming to the market today cannot – and do not – think solely of their local markets. European startups must embrace their global aspirations from the onset, and in doing so, these companies may actually have an advantage over their North American counterparts.

The truth is every European startup – while it might focus on its local market – must compete in a global market from the outset. Why is this?

Because customers understand their options. The abundance of information about just about any thing suggests that customers will have a strong understanding of the competitive feature set of just about any product offering. You will not be able to cut corners and omit features because, after all, you’re only selling in the Spanish or French, or German markets. Your customers know what is available in the US, the UK, China, New Zealand . . . and they will expect you to deliver a competitive feature set, regardless of localisation.

Today, when I speak with European entrepreneurs, it is quite obvious to me that these companies know the scope of their competitors around the world. They understand that they can’t just be the best offering in their local market in order to win the day, they have to be competitive on a global scale.

Of course this also means that companies will move more quickly from local to international markets . . . and that can only be good for innovation – also on a global scale.

We celebrate success . . . In the last year, we have seen some spectacular exits. Certainly, Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom has become an entrepreneurial hero in Europe and beyond. But Skype is not the only example… entrepreneurship is paying off and paying off well.

Indeed, Innovate!Europe is a celebration of 35 companies that have been selected from more than 100. It is a celebration of new opportunities in emerging global markets. And it is a celebration of the great momentum that we took on as a challenge at our first Innovate! event last year, but that we can see is driving real change and opportunity now.