The market defines behind "ahead/behind" by market value. None of the top 5 market caps in Europe are in tech. They are Nestle, Roche, Total SA, Novartis, and LVMH. They are tiny in comparison to the US tech giants.
All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.
An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.
Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:
Allowing companies to grow to the size of Facebook/Apple etc. is more and more being clearly demonstrated to be a bad thing.
The last time the relative size of US tech giants to EU companies was brought up here, a commentator replied that EU law is designed to prevent companies growing to this kind of outlandish size. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if so, it seems like a prudent approach even if we miss out on brownie points of getting to claim "ours is biggest". As others have pointed out here, the EU is not behind technologically. All we're behind on is company size, and I'm ok with that.
All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.
An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.
Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...