Britain must learn the lessons from California's Silicon Valley if it is to experience continued economic success, George Osborne has said.
The shadow chancellor was on Tuesday continuing a visit to the west coast of the US, where he was due to hold discussions with senior business leaders.
Osborne is meeting the chief executives of Yahoo and MySpace, the president of Mozilla and senior venture capitalists.
He will also hold discussions with employees and senior executives of internet search giant, Google.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Osborne said Britain needed to replicate the entrepreneurial spirit that had produced a series of successful internet companies.
"We can get the venture capital that helps turn good graduate ideas into big companies," he said.
"We can improve the links between our universities and our entrepreneurial businesses, in the way Stanford [university] does so well.
"We can improve our intellectual property laws so that when ideas are created, that's something we can protect. It costs four times as much to patent something in Britain as it does in the States.
"There are things we can learn, and we've got to learn them, because these are the industries that we have got to get into if Britain is to compete in a world of China and India, where we are not going to compete on wage costs."
Osborne said Britain had major universities and "plenty of money", but warned it was "just not focused on the kind of investment in some of these start-up companies".
"We should have this entrepreneurial culture which we see in places like Silicon Valley, but I agree that it's not happening at the moment," he added.
