IDC Forum, Paris: Negroponte claims US will beat cautious Europe

Professor Nicholas Negroponte, technology guru and founder of MIT's Media Lab, outlined his vision for the future of business in Europe at the IDC forum in Paris yesterday - and claimed that the US will leave it way behind unless attitudes to risk change.

He dismissed the usually cited differences between Europe and the US - in particular the availability of investment capital - and claimed the problem was one of culture.

Negroponte said two things were holding back European development. Firstly, an attitude to risk - he believes that children are brought up in Europe expecting to find a risk-free job and are more unwilling than US job seekers to enter high-risk careers later in life.

Secondly, he said that young business people in Europe are not taken as seriously as they are in the US, adding: "A society where young people take risks and are taken seriously will enjoy fast growth."

Negroponte claimed MIT graduates choosing to set up business in France took ten times as long to do it as they would in the States.

He also claimed that forecasters of the future number of Internet users were wrong by a factor of at least two. Picking up on a speech made earlier in the day by Compaq CEO Michael Capellas, Neproponte argued that the figures Capellas presented, predicting 500 million Internet users by 2003, were flawed.

Firstly, Negroponte claimed the research looked at Europe, the US and Japan and ignored the developing world. He said: "This is a tortoise and hare situation. China and India will soon make up half the population of the world and the developing world is prepared to take risks on technology that Europe and the US will not do."

He said three years from now Spanish could be the second language on the Internet - after Chinese.

Secondly, he also cited the example of Mexico, which has 200,000 registered Net subscribers, but argued that every account is used by an average of six people giving an actual 'wired population' of 1.2 million.