A few weeks ago, David Cameron announced a plan to turn east London's Olympic Park into one of the "world's great technology centres" -- a global technology hub to rival Silicon Valley in California. By bringing together startups, investors and broadband, he wants to tap "the creativity and energy of Shoreditch" and create Europe's next billion-dollar startups -- the "high-growth, highly innovative companies of the future".

But is it as simple as building an out-of-town "hub" and waiting for the next Twitters and Skypes to arrive? This was one of the key questions among delegates at the recent Monaco Media Forum, where media and tech executives from Europe and the West Coast got together to network. So when I ran into serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur -- whose LeWeb conference in Paris is one of the internet industry's must-go European events -- I wanted to know his take. It was blunt: "I hope Cameron's plan works, but first he needs to change the spirit of entrepreneurship," he said. "What's killing Europe is a lack of ambition -- and that doesn't get solved by politicians."

Too often in Europe, Le Meur said, businesses think local or copycat. "If your goal is to dominate Paris, you won't dominate the world. What the politicians forget is it starts at school. So teach young people that taking risks is OK, failure is OK, and showcase the success stories in Europe -- the Niklas Zennstroms, Brent Hobermans, Martin Varsavskys. We need our own stars in Europe."

Yet for all LeWeb's success -- now in its seventh year, it attracts 2,500 people from 60 countries -- Le Meur lives in San Francisco. "It's still the centre, like a university campus where I kitesurf with a friend from Facebook, run with the product manager for the Kindle…" It will take years for London or Paris to be so attractive to entrepreneurs, Tech City or not -- and it will take many more networking events, tax incentives, and an ability to fire and hire more easily, to attract people like Le Meur back.

London's strength certainly is its intellectual diversity. But if the Cameron government wants to make London the EU's San Francisco, they need to rethink their extreme tightening of the immigration laws, which makes it almost impossible for any creative, independent-thinking, entrepreneurial types to move here unless they're already making serious money -- and even then they'll have a tough time, because the new regs allow only 1000 such "Type I" (self-employed folks) to come in PER YEAR. Not a way to create fertile intellectual environment.

One more reason to love this place. And I do I do I do.