British companies lack the aspiration to become the biggest in the world, Business Secretary Vince Cable has said.
He said he thought it was a cultural problem, but added the country's self-made businessmen often reached a point when they decided to sell out rather than taking the risk of turning their firm into a global player.
In the UK we "haven't got the culture of trying to grow companies of world scale", he said.
Speaking at a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham he cited the example of Cambridge-based Autonomy, which supplies computer software capable of searching unstructured information such as text messages and emails, recently sold to Hewlett Packard in a £7.1 billion deal.
The company, which employs around 2,700 people, is thought to have netted founder Dr Mike Lynch in the region of £500 million.
But the Business Secretary seemed to question whether Dr Lynch should have tried to turn the company in to a multinational global player like Google rather than sell his 8% stake.
He said: "I mean, I think one of the aspects of the problem ... is partly a cultural thing, that why is it that every tiny company in the UK doesn't become the next Google?
"We had a very good example a month ago of a very, very highly successful British company in Cambridge - one the leading companies in the world, Mike Lynch's company, a great success, a great advertisement for Britain.
"But he got to a certain point where instead of deciding to become the next Google, he sold out, as it happens to Hewlett Packard. It's actually a good deal for him and probably a good deal for the country.
"But it says something about the way in Britain we think about growth, that there isn't that aspiration to become the new Hewlett Packard or the new Google."