Let’s think about how quickly the corporate world has transformed in the past two decades. Companies like Netflix, OpenAI and Tesla went from startups to global giants in a very short time. While China and the United States have massively accelerated their businesses and technologies, in Europe innovation has moved at a much slower pace.
Europe seems a world where time has stopped, where one has the privilege to wait for changes to happen gradually, businesses plan years ahead, and technology is considered just a tool or a “possibility”, rather than the driving force of entire industries. President Trump’s recent call to European countries about the need to increase expenditure on defense and security after years of guilty lethargy is a clear example of this attitude.
Today’s most successful entrepreneurs are not located in Europe. They prefer to operate in different economic environments where they do not simply manufacture better products or launch better services, but where they can lead waves of technological acceleration, thus transforming key industries in a few years, sometimes in months.
The Austrian perspective
Joseph Schumpeter taught us the concept of “creative destruction”, namely that innovation works by replacing old ways of doing things with better ones. This process drives economic progress as entrepreneurs disrupt existing markets. Israel Kirzner emphasized that in this uncertain world constantly and rapidly disrupted by radical innovations, successful entrepreneurs are those who spot opportunities by arbitraging in “out of balance” markets. Frank Knight and Ludwig von Mises distinguished between predictable or probabilistic risk and true uncertainty, showing how entrepreneurs make decisions when the future is uncertain by exercising “appraisal” and deploying capital to production in the anticipation of profits.
These brilliant Austrian ideas, despite being fundamental to understand how entrepreneurship is crucial to achieve prosperity, mainly focus on human decisions. To account for the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and automated systems of today’s most successful businesses, and on the interaction of these non-human systems with human decision-making, the Austrian view should be augmented with accelerationist arguments.
Accelerationism
The term “accelerationism” was used in Roger Zelazny’s 1967 book “Lord of Light”, where a group of revolutionaries wanted to take the society “to a higher level” by means of technology. Following James G. Ballard—“What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow”— accelerationism has shifted from a fictional element to a philosophical movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
Originating from the theoretical work of philosophers including Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari, accelerationism gained prominence through the work of Nick Land. Accelerationism theorizes the intensification of capitalist and technological processes, the inevitable merge of capitalism and technology into “techno-capital”. In Nick Land’s accelerationist framework, technology is not just a tool or a feature within capitalistic process, but the essential, transformative, destabilizing force of such process, and reinforces and accelerates it beyond its current limitations. In this light, entrepreneurs should navigate the intersection of technology and capital in deregulated environments, embrace technological change, and learn and experiment to work with it. One of the core insights of accelerationism is that technology and capitalism have merged into a self-reinforcing system that cannot be stopped. Thus, instead of fighting this acceleration and trying to slow down technological change, successful entrepreneurs, as well as policymakers, should learn to surf it and use it for their purposes.
How can accelerated entrepreneurship materialize in practice?
Accelerated entrepreneurship requires deregulation. Regulatory barriers are anti-Schumpeterian in nature, because they often slow down innovation and protect established players, preventing new ventures to rapidly experiment with techno-capital, scale-up, enter and challenge established paradigms and the dominants positions of incumbents.
Calling for deregulation is not about politics; it’s about creating conditions where innovation can happen quickly. Indeed, the most successful tech environments in the world exhibit light regulation of new technologies, where entrepreneurs can test new ideas without navigating years of bureaucratic approval, iterate faster, learn faster, and scale faster. The non-political nature of deregulation is also proven by its effectiveness across different political systems: such contexts are in fact located across different governance systems, from democratic countries like the US to authoritarian ones like China (at least for what concerns AI development), passing through India and Singapore.
If Europe wants to foster innovation, competitiveness and prosperity, it should do three things:
- streamline regulations by means of clear, simple rules for new technologies, rather than complex ex post regulatory processes that discourage those who develop new technologies;
- invest directly (given the absence of European big tech corporations) and stimulate private investments in technological infrastructures (e.g., AI research facilities) that enable entrepreneurial ecosystems;
- enable experimentation, for instance allowing entrepreneurs to test new ideas without administrative and regulatory burden.
Conclusion
Europe must accelerate, because the technological race—especially that related to AI—risks to be existential. The businesses that will dominate the next decade won’t be those that play it safe with traditional strategies. They’ll be the ones that embrace acceleration, leverage technology, and create value at unprecedented speed and scale.
This isn’t just about building better businesses: it’s about being an active player in building a new technologically constructed society. Only being active in this process, Europe can move quickly to solve its own problems, “exploit” the acceleration to serve its strategic interests, and avoid falling victim to technological enemies (in Schmittian sense).
Photo by Diogo Cardoso
