Microsoft plans to announce in Brussels on Tuesday that it is investing in a London-based computer networking company and a Dublin developer of mobile phone software, fresh evidence of what some leading venture capitalists say is a new blossoming of bankable innovation in Europe.

The value of the two agreements is so minuscule as to be immaterial to the U.S. software giant’s massive bottom line, but the deals stand out because they involve the exchange of intellectual property.

In recent weeks, there has been a veritable drumbeat of technology investments of various sizes. Ericsson, the Stockholm-based mobile network company, said Monday that it would buy Netwise, a Swedish developer of Internet phone software, for 300 million kronor, or $42.3 million. Last week, Motorola offered to buy TTP Communications, a British wireless company, for £103 million, or $194 million.

Names like Habbo Hotel of Finland, Netvibes of France, Babylon of Israel, FON of Italy, MySQL of Sweden and Musicstrands of Spain are among the Internet and software companies in the latest wave of innovations.

While European entrepreneurs say they are still hobbled by a more restrictive market environment, the venture investors have reasons to believe that Europe this time around will compete more evenly with Silicon Valley, which has been the locus for Internet and computer creativity since the 1990s.

For one, companies expect and plan to have an international presence from the moment of inception, knowing that they can count on a more mature Internet as a global distribution and communications tool.

In addition, the market for initial public offerings of technology stocks, a steamy advantage for U.S. companies in the 1990s, has cooled to a chill.

And Europe has a head start in several technologies that are especially hot, according to Danny Rimer, a managing partner with Index Ventures in Geneva.

One, Rimer said, is the use of open- source software, which encourages developers to exchange and improve programming code freely over the Internet. Linux, the open-source computer operating system, was created by Linus Torvalds in Finland; last month, Trolltech, a Norwegian company that markets its software on the open-source model, said it was taking its shares public.

Another particularly European niche is peer-to-peer computing, in which much of the work of conveying information on a network is handled by many small computers rather than one central server.

The Kazaa network, over which copyrighted song files are exchanged freely, began in Sweden. After that success, its founders turned right around and started Skype Technologies, the Internet phone company that eBay bought last year for 2.6 billion, or $3.4 billion.

One of the investments Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday also concerns a peer-to-peer technology. Under the deal, Microsoft is taking a 10 percent equity stake and a seat on the board of directors at Skinkers, a British company that uses peer-to-peer networking to deliver information and messages to employees’ desktop computers.

While the bulk of the exchange with Skinkers is based on sharing knowledge, not equity – the company will receive technology from Microsoft’s research lab in Cambridge, England, as well as sales and marketing expertise – executives say that is just as valuable.

Vimio, a developer of mobile media distribution software, is the other company with which Microsoft plans to enter an alliance. The two are the first European agreements for Microsoft’s IP Ventures program, which aims to place research from its labs with companies that can license and develop the intellectual property.

An unwillingness by European countries to encourage and pay for the educational needs of its best students – and to build elite educational institutions for them – is causing a dangerous decline in the number and quality of European engineers and scientists, according to a senior Microsoft executive.

The executive, Craig Mundie, said in an interview Thursday that there was strong growth in the availability of highly qualified engineers in countries like China, but that he was not seeing the same in Europe. “The number is falling,” Mundie said, “but also the quality of the training is falling behind the world standard.”

Mundie, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, predicted that the situation “could be a serious problem downstream in the society here.”

Mundie spoke from Brussels where he met with European Union officials including Janez Potocnik, science and research commissioner, and Günter Verheugen, commissioner for enterprise and industry.

Mundie’s remarks about the educational shortfall came amid growing anxiety in Europe that elite educational standards are falling behind those in countries like the United States.

Europe has only two universities – Cambridge and Oxford – listed  in the world’s top 10, according to a widely cited list of the world’s best research institutions produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

In Britain, where university education has traditionally been free, the government is introducing tuition fees to increase funding and raise standards.

In the interview, Mundie emphasized that Microsoft was increasingly hiring researchers from emerging economies like India, China and Russia. Microsoft now employs 1,800 Chinese; 1,200 Indians; and 800 Russians in its research and development divisions at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters, he said.

Microsoft employs about 12,000 people in Europe. Its biggest development center is in Copenhagen, with 700 employees, after which come development center in Ireland, innovation centers in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Part of the problem, Mundie said, is Europe’s “stratified” approach to education. Citing as examples countries like the United States, Japan, China and India, he said that “their whole educational system tends to funnel the strongest students to strongest institutions.”

In Europe, “there seems to be much more ambivalence” Mundie said, “about whether there are elite places.”

The European Commission said it agreed with Mundie’s assessment. In the current round of budget negotiations, it is demanding that member states spend more on high-tech research and development, and it is promoting the idea of centers of excellence.

“This is exactly our point,” said Antonia Mochan, a spokeswoman for Potocnik. “Europe is falling behind because we do not invest enough in education research and innovation. We need to do that.”

In the EU budget for 2007 to 2013, the commission has asked member countries to earmark 68 billion, or $83 billion, for research and development. Of that total, 10.5 billion would be spent on a European Research Council that would distribute money to encourage “blue sky” thinking.