I've spent my career floating back and forth between R&D and design engineering, in fact my last corporate job was as head of R&D, but with my own technical role being mostly design in the last 7 years I was there. I've spent the last 30 years toggling back and forth between Euro and USA companies, and since 2018 had been working in a department equally split between US and French engineers. In the 1990's, I was one of only two Americans in an all-German engineering effort, and so on...
It's a problem categorizing an entire nation of workers under one personality, let alone an entire continent, but I will agree there are higher probabilities of one proclivity vs. another, as you deal with people of different upbringing and education systems. What I've learned from working with so many Euro's over the years is that they more often tend to want to favor performance innovations over proven reliability. I say "proven" reliability, because they will calculate and simulate to death, why the new thing should be more reliable, rather than our more frequent tendency to fall back on what we already know to be reliable. Of course, the devil is in the details, and so little errors or oversights in such calculations and simulations often lead to surprising new ways to break things.
I really enjoy the sometimes-conflicting perspective, even if it sometimes leads to disagreements and arguments over how a design problem should be solved. I do think more industrial innovation per capita or per dollar comes from those ambitious Euro's who like to always push the boundaries, than those who want to continue on the path of what they already know to work, but of course this almost always comes with some growing pains and cost. As with all things, bliss is found in the middle ground, between extremes.
