Guérrée sees hope in the US, where Silicon Valley innovations are once again attracting investment as companies like Apple continue to post huge profits thanks to high-tech products.
"California has had a record high in the first quarter of 2010 – it's the highest ever level of private investment. It feels like 1999," said Guérrée, who has spent 20 years working as an entrepreneur in the US technology sector.
He plans to focus on the value of small businesses at June's World Investment Conference in La Baule, France, where investors and politicians – including EU President Herman Van Rompuy and Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani – will discuss ways of getting R&D investment back on track.
Guérrée hopes the upturn in California will spread to Europe, just as it did during the technology boom ten years ago. However, California's public finances are in disarray so the private sector must lead the revival.
"The entrepreneurial spirit in California – especially in places like Silicon Valley – is much more important than the state balance sheet," he said.
Politicians can help design a pro-enterprise environment but it falls to innovators to point the way forward, according to Guérrée. He believes policymakers should let businesses get on with inventing new technologies that change the way we live. It was the pro-enterprise environment in the US that enticed him to leave France in the first place, he said.
This line of thinking has been out of fashion since light-touch financial regulation bred the recent economic meltdown – just as unbridled enthusiasm led to the bursting of the dot com bubble.
"Maybe that's the price to pay for progress. Companies that came out of Silicon Valley changed how we live. Look at the impact of Facebook on our lives, and all the other technology that improved society. The question is whether large investors like pension funds can tolerate losses given the societal benefit for this kind of risky enterprise environment," Guérrée said.
Entrepreneurs in Europe are treated with suspicion, according to Guérrée, whereas Americans see businesspeople as heroes.
"We need to make entrepreneurs heroes so that kids want to run businesses instead of aspiring to be fonctionnaires," he said.
