Is Europe losing its voice? For decades it has been building digital markets, creative industries and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and yet in a world dominated by American tech giants and Chinese manufacturing power, a generation of European entrepreneurs is asking whether they need to leave for Silicon Valley or Shanghai to be taken seriously.

In this episode of Off Script, Elizabeth Kuiper and Naina Madan sit down with Alain Heureux, a serial entrepreneur, business angel and innovation leader who has been building companies and ecosystems across Europe since 1984. Alain led the IAB in both Belgium and Europe and today runs the Virtuology Academy, training leaders at companies like Saint Gobain, Etex and BNP Paribas.

Together they ask what European sovereignty really means in practice, whether Europe's diversity is its greatest strength or the thing holding it back, and what it actually takes to keep the continent innovative. Alain makes the case for big European brands reinvesting in their own cities, the way Philips reinvented Eindhoven into a thriving tech hub that now creates thousands of jobs, points to what universities like Munich's TUM are getting right, and argues that we should be teaching entrepreneurship to young people from the start. Underneath it all sits the bigger question: how do we stay human in the age of AI?

His reading recommendation for anyone thinking about where we go next is the work of Yuval Noah Harari, because before we talk about technology, we have to talk about people.

📚 Recommended: Yuval Noah Harari's books 🎙️ Listen and follow Off Script wherever you get your podcasts.

Keep listening, keep questioning.