It is not often that a minister quotes an eighties pop song to explain a strategic failure. Christina Egelund does it without flinching. If she could turn back time, she tells a room of health industry executives in Copenhagen, she would go back to the early 2000s and do the one thing Europe did not do.
The admission travels further than it first sounds. Egelund is not mourning missed business opportunities. She is talking about power: who holds it, who built the systems the rest of us now live inside, and why Europe keeps finding itself a tenant in infrastructure someone else owns.
Her worry is that it is happening again. As artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology converge into what she calls a transformation “bigger than the industrial revolution, and bigger than the internet,” Europe risks losing a second technological revolution before it has fully accepted that the first one is already lost.