Brain Drain or Brain Circulation?

I read this article on news.com a few days ago. It is an interview with Anna Lee Saxenian, the dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

In this interview, AnnaLee says migration overseas doesn't need to be one-way brain drain, but would result brain circulation. She supports our belief that innovation can come from any geography of the world, just because of migration and how brain (knowledge, experienece and know-how) circulates.

Here is a part of the interview that underlines our work in Golden Horn Ventures:

Stefanie Olsen(news.com): What makes for a thriving technology community like Silicon Valley? Is it government incentives, cash resources or access to engineers and universities?
Saxenian: It is certainly not government incentives. Silicon Valley has evolved over the past 40 years to be a rich community of skill and social networks that allow people to come together, come up with new ideas, and implement them very quickly.
Because you have a deep base of technical skill, marketing capital, managerial skill that's been around, you also have an ecosystem of suppliers--everything from legal, design, banking, venture capitalists--so if you come up with an idea, like a new mobile media, you can pull together a team faster than any other place in the world. That's a product of learning in a community, and it's very hard to replicate.

Stefanie Olsen(news.com): In your mind, what comes close to Silicon Valley?
Saxenian: These new regions, Taiwan, Bangalore, Shanghai, they are extensions of Silicon Valley. This happens from people with deep roots in Silicon Valley, and then they take with them elements of the Silicon Valley business model--the start-up culture, the venture capital, the idea of minimizing hierarchy and creating more open organizations, which is often alien in places like India and China. Those economies have been dominated by family run firms or state-supported enterprises. And they're not creating head-on competitors to Silicon Valley; they're creating linked partners.
Those places look like hybrids, a cross between Silicon Valley and domestic institutions. They're similar, but they don't have the accumulated know-how and talent there.

Mae Ozkan

Comments

[electronic medical records]

Hmmmm, it is certainly not government incentives.

Kevin