THE scene in Salzburg earlier this year was one that Joseph Schumpeter, an economist obsessed with innovation, and Mr Drucker, the management expert, would surely have approved of. Several dozen government officials and academics from around the world gathered at Schloss Leopoldskron, a spectacular rococo palace located on the shores of an idyllic lake. They came not for the fresh Alpine air, hearty Austrian fare or even the hills alive with music. It was for a conference organised by the Salzburg Global Seminar, a non-government organisation, to discuss what they could do to turn their economies into innovation powerhouses.
Holding such a meeting in the heart of Europe seemed only fitting—and not just because the two great theorists of innovation both hailed from the region. After all, it was a European, France's Georges Doriot, who invented venture capital during his time teaching at Harvard. And it was another Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the word entrepreneur two centuries ago to describe the plucky upstart who “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”
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