Fifty years ago, a myth circulated in the U.S. to the effect that a tiny island off the coast of Japan was secretly renamed Usa. The renaming was supposedly designed to allow Japan to export goods with "MADE IN USA" stamped on the bottom.

That story made some sense shortly after World War II. The Japanese were generally making shoddy goods, and Americans could be forgiven for assuming that the best stuff could be made only in the U.S. But that feeling of superiority eventually let the Japanese catch the U.S. sleeping. First, Japan innovated with transistor radios and won control of the market for consumer electronics. Later, it set the world’s standards for manufacturing quality and wreaked havoc on many American competitors.

I suppose it has been a while since the U.S. learned those hard lessons about Japan, but it still surprises me that Americans today have that same unquestioning belief in their technological prowess. They assume that they are leading the way in everything from the tiniest chips to the broadest ideas about e-commerce business models. It is all a touch baffling to this Svenska pojke (Swedish boy), because the rest of the world is, in fact, ahead in many important areas. Americans might want to spend a bit more time acquainting themselves with what is going on outside their borders.

I am not at all offended that many Americans I meet confuse Switzerland and Sweden. Why not? They are both small places with an abundance of forests and hospitable blond people. What seems odd is that people know so little about Ericsson and Nokia, the Swedish and Finnish wireless telecommunications leaders, which sell two-thirds of the world’s mobile phones. Nor do people seem to realize that the most wired place on earth is not San Francisco’s New Economy environs, but that remote corner of the world called Scandinavia, where 53% of Swedes and 44% of Finns have Internet connections. Or that the Land of the Midnight Sun has the highest rate of mobile phone usage (60% of the population in Norway have wireless phones, vs. 30% in the U.S.).

There are lots of other areas where Europe is leading the U.S. To pick a few:

Web-enabled phones. Europe’s agreement on a single standard for wireless calls, called GSM, is expected to let consumers there get highly functional Web phones and gadgets way before U.S. consumers. America has a crazy quilt of digital wireless protocols, including TDMA and CDMA, and its archaic cell-phone system almost guarantees that calls get dropped. So, the U.S. has a long way to go on wireless, and progress is sure to be slow. If, as many people expect, wireless networks come to dominate wired networks, then look out. Europe will get there first.

In a tacit acknowledgement of European leadership, Microsoft, which has used Sweden as a giant test market for years, last year bought Sendit, a Swedish software company, and STNC, a smart-phone company in the United Kingdom, for their wireless know-how.

Anything wireless. While the U.S. struggles to build a truly national cell-phone architecture, Europe is moving on to the next step, with a series of interesting (and sometimes amusing) applications. On the streets of Helsinki, mobile phones are being used as a payment system for Coca-Cola vending machines. The money is either deducted from a debit account or added to the purchaser’s phone bill. Some European teenagers download Internet cartoons on their phones, or use them to play a form of mobile tag.

The Linux operating system, which was created by a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds and is beginning to challenge the dominance of Unix and Windows.

Smart cards, which contain computer chips and can be used in a host of ways—as highly secure debit cards, as prepaid phone cards, as a means for paying highway tolls without stopping at a tollbooth. The two largest manufacturers are Schlumberger and Gemplus, French companies that have an estimated 63% share of the world market. According to research firm Business Communications, smart cards were used in more than $5 billion in transactions in 1998, and that figure will nearly triple by 2003.

Intelligent vehicles. While U.S. car makers are doing some interesting things here, European companies are out ahead. Mercedes-Benz is on its way to offering a car that lets motorists surf the Web, send e-mail, receive route guidance, pay bills, make on-line purchases, make hotel reservations, and watch television or play video games (from displays in the back of headrests).

Speech recognition. Belgian company Lernout & Hauspie is the leader in the field. [For an interview with Jo Lernout, see Off the Cuff.] L&H, which recently received investments of $30 million from chip maker Intel and $15 million from Microsoft, is seeking to jam speech technology into tomorrow’s itty-bitty gadgets, such as the devices promised by Nokia and Ericsson that will combine cell phones and personal digital assistants. The intent is to be able to, for instance, tell your mobile phone to "Call Fred."

MP3. Web music’s market leader is Swiss/German company Micronas, which makes an MP3 decoder for downloading tunes. It is working on applications for MP3 on mobile phones, car radios, and mobile "flash players."

Lest I be accused of being myopic myself, by focusing on Western Europe, where I grew up:

Japan leads the world in the technology that goes into: watches, liquid crystal displays, small portable computers, games, consumer-electronic devices, high-speed railways, and supercomputers. Korea and Japan dominate flat-panel computer displays. Israel has companies that are leaders in software for computer-network security and in flash memory disks. Eastern Europe, of all places, is starting almost from scratch and building fantastic telecommunications systems that should prove to be state-of-the-art.

Don’t get me wrong. America’s technology remains vast and awesome. I love this country. Its bustle, its drive, and most of all, of course, its fast-food culture. The rugged individualism here truly gets things done and is in stark contrast with the zeitgeist of Norway and Sweden, called jantelagen, which roughly means, "you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously." But as much as I love this country, it is nevertheless amazing to this European that Americans still tend to believe that everything was invented here. I’m reminded of British comedian John Cleese’s wry observation that, "When we hold a tournament called the World Series, we tend to invite other nations."

Lederhausen is vice president of corporate strategy at McDonald’s. He can be reached at mats.lederhausen@mcd.com.