The government complains about "la fuite des cerveaux" (brain drain), but they're not doing much to prevent it (whether it is for entrepreneurs or researchers— I've been in both camps).
I randomly watch news/docs about some French "startup", and the spread mean size seems to be 20 to 100 employees. That's enough to make you think what "bootstrapping" means here.
Even without talking about that side of things, it's extremely hard to find anyone technically truly competent to sidekick with, let alone in technologies compatible with startup rhythms (even Rails and Django are a rarity, the huge flock only knows C# and Java at a very, ahem, academic level). Not exactly helpful if you want to build your MVP quickly.
I'm not even talking about the legal paperworks that would sink a founder's time like your nearby blackhole. I'm contemplating doing this myself since a few years and the amount of crap you have to wade through is astounding. The sanest solution is moving to the UK (but my personal situation prevents that, for now).
The whole ecosystem is heavyweight and not nimble at all.
For starters, there's a lot of biomedical entrepreneurial technology work done outside of these two area.
Or look at the mini-mill revolution in steel production (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimill).
Those are just two examples where the state of the art is being pushed hard. Less technologically advanced (often disruptive innovations (which mini-mills sort of are due to their feedstocks vs. equipment)) happen all over the place, I could dig up a bunch of examples in firearms, especially accessories (e.g. EOTech in Ann Arbor, Michigan). Or my parents in the early '80s when consumer use of C-band transmissions took off (for people in areas not served by cable companies; this is now down in the K-band by Direct TV and Dish):
They first helped the first company to develop remote control systems that would move your dish from satellite to satellite. One eventual extension of this or spinoff was small (e.g. 4 feet) dishes that would fold down for travel, e.g you could put one on top of your RV.
But the more interesting work was in LNBs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_noise_block-downconverter), which combine a low noise amplifier with down conversion for easy signal transmission to the receiver inside the home. This was fairly advanced stuff for the era, the usual analog stuff, surface mount construction way before it was (widely) used in computers, they'd put them in a freezer and bake them, etc.
All done in the deepest of Red State SW Missouri, in the Joplin area.
There's lots more entrepreneurial stuff my family did from this location, that's just one of the the highest tech examples.
Also look at where US job growth comes from in modern times. Smaller companies that were startups, not big established companies.
For one thing, US - New York - Silicon Valley has basically none of the social-democratic benefits of living in Europe.
For another thing, America really does make it dirt easy to register some kind of small business with a state or municipal government as existing and doing business in... something. This doesn't mean doing it right is easy, but doing it at all is very easy, and it's also correspondingly easy to go back and reregister your business when someone experienced tells you what to actually do.
Of course. I meant in terms of entrepreneurial energy and opportunity. On everything else (vacation, healthcare, affordable college) Europe is light-years ahead of the U.S. at this point.
I'm a French "entrepreneur/engineer adult" and I have no reason to leave France.