If you're talking about why we don't see more visible commercial innovation from European countries then it's more about access to the enormous amounts of capital to build a big name startup like Uber etc.
Nobody notices the legions of small bootstrapped or seed to profitable software businesses across the EU.
I would think that since innovation and growth (caused by innovative use of resources or increase in efficiency or novel products and services) in general should be relative to the population and its state to begin with, nominal GDP growth per annum would be a reasonable metric as a proxy for the wildly non-measurable "innovation in terms of GDP"; for reference, here's the data for 2018:
USA: 2.9% Canada: 1.9%
Sweden: 2.2% Norway: 1.3% Finland: 1.7% Denmark: 2.4%
Germany: 1.5% France: 1.7%
Ireland: 8.2% (not a typo, likely explained by expansion of business services from NA into EU) UK: 1.4%
Portugal: 2.4% Italy: 0.8% Greece: 1.9% Spain: 2.4%
Germany is at 3.4% of GDP spending on R&D and the USA at 2.8% France is also right up there at 2.2%
I'm going with the OECD definition here: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm
Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.
Tesla sales are a fraction of any of the big three in terms of sales or revenue.
They sold 192,000 vehicles in the US in 2019. Each of the Big Three sold well over three million.
Tesla currently loses $2500 on every vehicle they sell
People always seem to compare Tesla technology of tomorrow with what its competitors are doing right now. That's why Volvo "only" has level 3 self-driving, while Tesla has a fleet of robotaxis that are earning you money on its ride-sharing app while you sleep.
I joke, but a large portion of the Tesla fan base has no clue what is going on in the autonomous driving or auto manufacturer world outside of Tesla. Tesla has been a big innovator, but they aren't leaders in everything....not even close.
The thread is about innovation, so that's what counts. And what other manufacturer matches what Tesla has driving on the roads today? The closest realistic challenger is the expensive Porsche Taycan which is still missing all the functionality and usability features.
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Little known German company ZF has almost double the revenue of Tesla. They also make the transmission for the Porsche Taycan EV that's outselling the 911.
Tesla has sub-1% market share in the global auto market and rapidly declining energy product deployment (they deployed 4x more MW 4 years ago than the did last year). Let's not pretend Tesla has taken over anything yet.
German companies with more revenue than Amazon: Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Uniper, Bosch.
On the smaller end, Germany also has a comparable number of employer firms per capita as the U.S.
Empirically it largely is a myth that worker protection and consumer protection stiffles enterprises or innovation.
Valuation reflects market sentiment and potential but perhaps I should have left it out. The real focus is the "world-changing" aspect of the products produced.
What have been the recent global innovations produced by those German companies? Anything turned into a household name?
That's why they're called a "hidden champion".
We've had gyroscopes for a century. The iPhone is innovative because it used that to implement a new device that changed mobile computing.
I'm actually not quite sure what you mean with the "global innovations" part, though, could you expand on that? What is it that makes e.g. Microsoft innovative?
What I see is the your big four all sell consumer product/ services and thus are more visible. E.G. Bosch is developing electric powertrain components, produces radar/lidar and video sensors for autonomous driving. Bosch also produces the robots used in those mostly-automated factories.