Sami Mahroum

Highly skilled globetrotters: mapping the international migration of human capital

In the final years of the twentieth century, brain drain, skills shortages and lack of career opportunities have become issues of major concern for policy-makers concerned with R&D in government, academia, and industry. Labour mobility across political borders, especially among highly skilled labour, provides a solution for the aforementioned concerns to some actors, but engenders problems to others. Drawing on various empirical investigations and on previous studies, this paper attempts to provide a mapping of the various types of human resources mobility across national borders. It argues that various groups of highly skilled persons are driven by different push and pull factors. In addition to immigration legislation, other factors, such as taxation, studying abroad, quality of work, openness in communication, business expansion overseas, labour market supply and demand signals, etc., play an important role in the choice of highly skilled migrants to relocate overseas.

The international policies of brain gain: A review

Abstract Policymakers across OECD countries have become increasingly concerned with the national and international debate about brain drain and have launched appraisal processes of the situations in their respective countries. The debates took different turns in different countries, but nevertheless, some common issues cut across a number of countries. The issues of academic structures and traditions, legislation and management, and reputation and image have surfaced as critical factors for brain drain and brain gain. In this paper I provide a systematic analysis of the international policy debates surrounding the issue of brain drain and brain gain and make an attempt to distinguish between them by classifying them into different categories.

Scientific Mobility: An Agent of Scientific Expansion and Institutional Empowerment

This article argues that scientific mobility has, as a part of its function, enhanced scientific expansion and the formation of gravity centers in science. Through the mobility of scientists, scientific traditions that are embodied in certain schools or departments expand to embrace other spatial sites of science and include them in their social spaces. The article uses geographical discourse to presume a relationship between mobility, scientific expansion, and scientific change. In doing so, it seeks to improve our understanding of the contribution of scientific mobility to the formation of scientific legitimacy and institutional credibility.

A Critical Review of the Interplay between Policy Instruments and Business Models: Greening the Built Environment a Case in Point

Policy instruments introduced with the aim of promoting environmental sustainability are often designed and evaluated in terms of their impact in facilitating technological change. The bulk of ‘green’ policy instruments that have emerged in recent decades have had as their target the facilitation of the development and adoption of greener processes, goods and services. Concurrent business models have sought to create and capture value arising from this policy-induced transition to more environmentally sustainable practices. However, both such policy instruments and the business models are often evaluated more in terms of their impact on the development and adoption of innovations, and less in terms of their impact on behavioural change. This paper provides a critical review of interplay between green policy instruments and green business models from a behavioural perspective. Thus, instead of looking at policy instruments from a technology-push and demand-pull perspective, this paper samples them in terms of sticks, carrots and sermons and then provides a critical review of the emergent business models that have emerged in response to stick-, carrot-, and sermon-types of policy regimes. The paper finds that most green business models that emerged, in the built environment, in response to sticks may be characterised as buck-passing, i.e. passing costs to others and skirting around the stick of regulations; those that emerged in response to carrots as opportunistic carpet-bagging aimed at capturing temporary gains; while those that emerged in response to sermon-orientated awareness campaigns, show a tendency to diffuse even in the absence of supportive fiscal conditions.

Scientists and global spaces

Abstract This paper discusses the geographic mobility of scientists from the perspective of various science-specific factors. It posits that one factor contributing to the mobility of scientists is the interaction of factors such as prestige, reputation, and recognition. It also suggests that through their mobility, scientists form social spaces that thereafter shape their future mobility.

Innovation and the city

Abstract Innovation is an increasingly globalised phenomenon but the highest rates of visible innovation are found in and around cities. This paper explores the ‘urban factors’ that support innovative activity, focusing on English cities. Agglomeration economies can help explain both cities’ resilience and the characteristics of urban markets, assets, networks and institutions that help innovation to take place. A high-level explanatory framework is set out, using the concepts of ‘urban hubs’ and ‘local links’ to draw together these ideas. The framework is then explored using five case studies from the UK and abroad. The findings suggest a number of different ‘innovation trajectories’ for different city types. Innovation policymakers should pay more attention to improving urban infrastructure, skills and critical mass, and should devolve strategy-making towards pan-regional and sub-regional actors.

Competing for the highly skilled: Europe in perspective

The increased demand internationally for highly skilled personnel and the expansion of international education opportunities will inevitably exercise pressure on the European stock of highly skilled labour. This paper gives an overview of the flows of skills internationally and argues that the qualitative aspects of European emigrants are far more significant than their quantitative aspects. Europe might be losing its brightest and best; in particular, Europe might be losing the young scientific and technological and managerial personnel, probably those with the most up-to-date training. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Policy Innovations: Towards an Analytic Framework

Abstract This paper argues that innovation in public policy arises within the general frameworks of public policymaking and implementation. Therefore, policy innovations can only be studied and understood in the context of public policy and public sector environments at large. To date, frameworks to analyse policy innovations in terms of type, scale and aim have been lacking. Accordingly, this paper uses two public policy analytic frameworks to create an integrated policy innovation analysis framework. The paper then makes use of four high-profile cases of public policies to operationalize the typology scheme seeking to achieve two things; a methodological verification of the usefulness of the mapping scheme as an analytic tool and how it may be used to generate and structure cross-case learning in the domain of policy innovation.

Measuring Innovation Efficacy: An Operational Framework for Mapping and Measuring Innovation Capacity and Performance of Countries

In an increasingly globalised economy, the ability to draw in innovations and ideas from elsewhere and build on them to create value at home has become a powerful facility for economic growth. Since some places are better at adopting and adapting borrowed ideas than others, the process of ‘innovation through adoption’ deserves more attention at both scholarly and policymaking levels. Based on such beliefs, this paper elaborates the notion of ‘innovation adoption’ and develops it further to advance the notion of ‘innovation efficacy’. The latter is interpreted here as the efficiency and effectiveness of innovation systems in terms of accessing, anchoring, diffusing, creating and exploiting innovations. This notion is further illustrated in a measurement tool based on a composite index, which we name the ‘Innovation Efficacy Index’. The ultimate contribution of the paper lies in its aim to shift the traditional focus of attention from a fixation with developing and exploiting new knowledge locally to the prospect of value creation through accessing, anchoring or diffusing knowledge acquired from elsewhere.

Assessing human resources for science and technology: The 3Ds framework

This paper argues that the extent to which national human resources for science and technology (HRST) are efficiently used and internationally competitive depends on the overall performance of three inter-related national environments, namely: the human resources development environment (supply); the deployment environment (demand); and the drawing-in environment (public policy and legislation). The three environments and the relations among them shape the labour market dynamics for HRST workforce, which in turn can be analysed in an analytic framework developed in this paper. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.