Mobile brain drain

On a recent trip to Moscow to the excellent DEMO Europe event – where tech start-ups pitch to an audience of other techheads, VCs, angels and the press – I was astounded by how advanced, creative and focused mobile and online technologists are in Russia, Russian Federation countries and Turkey. It really put into perspective how small, really, the UK and developed European markets actually are. And how excited and forward thinking these ‘new’ regions are.

But the real eye-opener for me was in talking to the US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, and entrepreneur Gentry Underwood (founder of Orchestra and developer of Mailbox, recently sold to Dropbox). Neither really told me anything about technology or the mobile market that I didn’t already know, but rather they offered a stark reminder of how politics impacts the world of mobile and online tech.

The issue is that of education and immigration. Ambassador McFaul was passionate about how, despite front line political issues between Russia and the west being a bit sticky right now (namely because of Syria and US policy on the Middle East), behind the scenes the two countries are working very closely together to share technological expertise and, for the Americans, to tap into huge wealth of knowledge and creativity in digital technology in the former Soviet Union.

The problem is that there are not enough ‘brains’ in the US – and to some extent the UK, Germany, France and Spain – to offer creative new ideas and the creation of new products that create new markets. Especially in mobile.

Both McFaul and Underwood, are concerned that massive tech brands such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are taking all the best brains, leaving a paucity of top flight engineers, designers and technologists to help develop other, smaller and more entrepreneurial businesses.

But there is also, according to both McFaul and Underwood, another issue at play: the way that the economic downturn has created an atmosphere that is unfriendly to foreigners.

Currently, in the UK and US, the best foreign students – who can afford a western education – are being educated and developed to a very high level, but rather than being allowed to use that knowledge to better the economies of the countries they have been educated in, they are ‘encouraged’ to go home. And they take their skills with them.

The official UK policy is to attract the best and brightest from overseas to study here – but only if they can pay through the nose to do it. And the visa application process – and indeed the visas on offer themselves – are so convoluted that they are very hard to fathom. Looking at them, however, you see that student visas almost all insist that the student, on graduation, doesn’t have much leave to remain. We are actively turning these highly skilled people away.

Couple this with an enormous backlog of visa applications for students to study in the UK and what one Home Office insider describes as “utter ineptitude”, it doesn’t look good.

The education systems in the UK and US are also woefully behind the times when it comes to teaching the kind of skills needed to foster the mobile technologists of the future too.

With the big IT giants draining the top domestic brains from the workforce, and with these highly educated foreign graduates going to China, India Russia, Turkey and Brazil, the developed world is teetering on the brink of being left behind in the digital technology race.

Of course, there are many brilliant people in each country, but if you look at it purely as a numbers game, there are more of them elsewhere than there are in the UK and, increasingly, in the US. And they are increasingly getting funding for their ideas.

So what needs to be done? Better education is obviously key: we need to create more digital brains domestically. We also need investment in start-ups. But we also need to look at the value that foreigners bring to any market. And this is perhaps the hardest issue: especially given the current climate of anyone foreign being seen simply as a benefits claimant who gives nothing back.

But the other thing that my jaunt to Moscow showed me was that any old enemy can become your friend and friendship is more productive and rewarding all round than mistrust and downright hatred.