EuroDude, where's my innovation?

Yesterday I had coffee with Peter Cochrane, former CTO of BT. He had a lot of interesting and provocative (well, not to me, but probably to a lot of people) things to say about what telcos in general could have done five or ten years ago to position themselves to deal with the situation which has evolved. We both lamented the death/dearth of internally-generated innovation in telcoland. I hope to interview him at some point in the future.

On the subject of innovation, here's some weighty weekend reading from the EU on the subject of innovation in Europe, as highlighted in this morning's Financial Times. For those interested, it's worth spending a bit of time looking at the links on this main page, which include some interesting break-out assessments of topics such as consumer attitudes towards innovation and drivers of innovation. The summary findings show Europe led by Sweden, Switzerland and Finland, with Spain, Italy and Portugal all coming in well below the EU25 average. On a more depressing note, at current rates of change, new accession countries may not catch up with the EU25 in the foreseeable future, and the EU25 as a whole may take 50 years to overtake the US. If there is perplexity in some quarters as to motivators for alternative broadband projects, maybe some answers can be found here.