Once again we hear that the U.S. lags Europe in an important new technology. The U.S. is just now moving away from plain magnetic stripe credit cards, which are vulnerable to counterfeiting, while Europe and Asia switched to more secure chip-based “smart cards” years ago.

There’s no disputing that Europe and Asia are the smart card leaders, but the U.S. is poised to leap ahead with smartphone-based mobile payments. And it’s worth understanding why. Europe is sometimes first-to-market with new technologies, because Europe chooses relatively safe new technologies and carefully manages their implementation. The U.S. produces more innovation, however, because there is more spontaneous, bottom-up development in the U.S.

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