Encouraged by recent postings and an interesting article from Romania from 2006 http://mises.org/story/2371 I want to join the brain drain debate.
Austria has been suffering from brain drain during the entire 2nd half of the 20th century but has recently introduced measures to get good people back: An organisation called BrainPower www.brainpower-austria.at, a department of Austria’s research funding and promotion agency FFG www.ffg.at is offering support for researchers who are interested in getting back to Austria (jobs, accommodation, travel costs, information etc.). They work closely together with an organisation called ASCINA, Austrian Scientists and Scholars in North America, an initiative of the Office of Science and Technology (OST) at the Austrian Embassy in Washington D.C. www.ascina.at, this, because a major part of the brains that emigrated have drained to North America.
Networking plus practical support obviously help, as their statistics show, but the best proof for real breakthroughs is “give them appropriate playgrounds, and they come back themselves”.
The most striking example was and is the Vienna BioCenter whose creation was a fast reaction of the City of Vienna to the boom in biogenetics by creating a perfect research infrastructure together with pharma giants Boehringer Ingelheim and others as well as Vienna University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences www.viennabiocenter.org/members/profiles.asp on the premises of Vienna’s former slaughterhouse. They were rewarded by the comeback of Josef Penninger, an Austrian born bio guru who had made a splendid career in Canada, and is now working in Vienna supported by a highly qualified international team www.imba.oeaw.ac.at .
The second example is the re-migration of the Austrian born Atom physics celebrity Joerg Schmidmayer and his crew from Mannheim to Vienna when he got a brand new laboratory at Vienna’s University of Technology financed by public money and Siemens. Among other things they are doing basic research in new semiconductor technologies, which brings us back to our ICT context www.atomchip.org.
These are, however, examples. I do not see a paradigm yet. Infrastructure is expensive, the Austrians are buerocratic and such excellent PPPs (Private Public Partnerships) are still rare. Yet there are EU money and lots of private capital available – I think it rather needs the right people and a lot of initiative to release them and thus drive the European research community back to excellence.
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These are encouraging examples, Guenther, but they do seem like the exception rather than the rule. These are high-visibility expatriates being offered very attractive conditions.
The challenge is to attract the legions of talented young people who are still working their way up the ladder in New York and London.
Several years ago when Ireland was at the height of its Celtic Tiger boom I recall a friend telling me the Irish government had set up stands at the airport to welcome back the expatriates and encourage them to resettle in Ireland.
All I have to do is browse my LinkedIn or Facebook contacts to see how many Central Europeans I know live outside the region. The numbers are quite impressive!