[30.04.2008 first posted on silicon republic]
Every organisation needs to learn how to retain and attract skilled and mobile knowledge workers from Ireland, together with those from every corner of the globe.

Knowledge has long been thought to be an intangible thing; something that cannot be easily anchored, ring-fenced or audited as an asset on a balance sheet. Ironically, this seemingly ephemeral thing is increasingly the key differentiator between competing organisations, competing regions and competing countries. The attraction and retention of knowledge is not quite so ephemeral an exercise as one might think.
Knowledge resides more in people than in the technological repositories they use to store information. This aspect of knowledge management (KM) becomes even more important when one considers that recent Forfás reports highlight the strength of our services sectors and the fact that even our manufactured exports from Ireland increasingly have a ’service wrap’ - the marginal value of which is directly dependent on the quality and skills of the people who provide this service layer.
As I write, I am working in Warsaw for the first time, staying in one of the few buildings to survive the destruction of the Thirties and looking out on the Centre for Science and Culture in the centre of the city - one of Warsaw’s tallest buildings, laconically nicknamed ‘Stalin’s birthday cake’. The fact that any centre that celebrates science should not only be the historically tallest building in the centre of this city - but that science should be so historically aligned with its culture - is indicative of a long-held commitment in Poland to science, engineering and technology (SET), where SET knowledge is a natural part of the skillset of those who graduate. While English is not the natural language of the average Polish person, as in many countries it is the language of technology and is spoken fluently in that context.
With the exception of its SET educational and transport infrastructure, Poland feels like Ireland did in the early Eighties - a quiet place where parents have little option but to wave goodbye to their children and grandchildren in the hope that they will return soon. These parents may get their wish within four to six years, if Poland uses its share of European structural funds in the smart way that Ireland did. Poland will have a shorter distance to travel to become a knowledge economy, because it is starting from a higher infrastructural base than we had in the Eighties. If the full plane back to Dublin is anything to go by - fortunately - Ireland for the moment is one of the beneficiaries of their educational bounty.
eady, SET, go Ireland Inc needs to make the pursuit of SET a deeply ingrained and valued part of its culture. Every organisation needs to learn how to retain and attract skilled and mobile knowledge workers from Ireland, together with those from every corner of the globe, as we are plainly not producing or retaining enough indigenous SET people here. In infrastructural terms, Ireland has never been a Celtic tiger - it bears a closer resemblance in this regard to a feral cat in a cardboard box.
We need to accelerate the rollout of the National Development Plan to retain the construction people who are currently drifting away and commit them to large infrastructural projects all over Ireland in the provision of fast intercity and urban-rail networks, sustainable multi-purpose buildings and improved energy solutions.
The attraction and retention of knowledge is facilitated through deliberately wrapping the required hard and soft infrastructures around the modern knowledge worker - a people-based worker-centric approach.
People are mobile; we have changing value systems, which dictate our priorities over our working lifetimes. Among truly developed and competitive nations serious about attracting and retaining knowledge workers, the hard infrastructures of high-speed broadband with serious bandwidth – fibre enabled, Wi-Fi and WiMax as appropriate; efficient and affordable public rail transport, affordable effective health and lifetime educational systems – are increasingly assumed to be a given, ie easily and affordably available to residential, academic and corporate users. The recently published document from Dublin Chamber – Developing a Knowledge City Region - is a good overview of many of these local infrastructural objectives.
The organisations and geographic areas that will excel in the competitive attraction and retention of knowledge workers over time will be those that not only have world-class hard infrastructures, but those that also optimise their indigenous differentiators, familiarise themselves with the value systems of their targets and embrace the soft infrastructural requirements of their global knowledge demographic.
Some of the ’soft’ infrastructures that support the lifestyles that people want include: • sufficient locally available career opportunities to provide people with the ability to use their knowledge to progress/change careers a few times throughout their lives without having to change country to do it
• a workplace culture and geo-social support system that is supportive of every individual’s requirement to function as a time-poor person with some kind of familial responsibility, whether to an ageing parent, a partner, or a child
• a culturally, information-based and environmentally rich location to feed the soul and engender a feeling of security and connectedness with nature and the wider world
• convenient clustering of lifestyle facilities and services around comfortable, secure, sustainable and affordable housing.
While this may seem like a tall order, any organisation, city, region or country that is not configuring itself around creating that ‘fear of loss’ among that mobile knowledge demographic, will soon find itself becalmed in the global sea of ongoing competition for the limited supply of targeted talent.
Charles Leadbeater, the UK thinker on innovation and creativity, produced a study of the Asia-Pacific region entitled The Atlas of Ideas: The new Geography of Science. In it, he mapped the differences in approaches between Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in terms of KM and innovation management generally. Some of the illuminating examples quoted in that study highlight how Korea is targeting particular academic researchers in leading European educational establishments with offers of research funding, improved lab facilities and accelerated professional advancement to professor level at ages unheard of in Europe.
While I am not an advocate of academic poaching, I can appreciate that this example of a people-based strategy yields a double benefit to Korea - they enhance their own competitiveness while compromising their competitors. Korea’s reputation as an innovative nation is growing, and its productivity and competitiveness continues to improve.
Google has scaled up quickly in Dublin with the kind of employees it requires, based largely on a detailed attention to attracting the exact skills profiles required and optimising the differentiating soft infrastructures that its international target employees seem to enjoy and value. Beanbags, fussball tables and free chocolate may seem trivial on the surface, but as indicative building blocks of a unique and deliberately tailored corporate culture they yield a high return on investment in KM terms.
By Frances Buggy