o appears Vietnam is followi

tnam breed innovators?

Global Post 01 March 2011

Vo Van Toi’s high-tech laboratory clashes against its impoverished surroundings. Outside, cattle roam swampy fields and squatters sell sugarcane from wooden huts. Inside, he shows off his near-infrared spectroscopy machine, which measures oxygen content in blood, and a CT scanner. The contrast sums up Vietnam’s current state of development: It’s a relatively poor nation, with per-capita GDP of $3,000, trying to follow its larger Asian neighbors’ leap into an era of skyscrapers and international commerce. To do that, it needs to bring in a plethora of new technology — and the innovators who come with it.

So where can Vietnam get its base of engineers, scientists and academics? From abroad, especially from overseas Vietnamese who know the language and culture. They, like Vo, are invigorating the country’s growth that reached double digits before the 2008 economic downturn.

Vo is one of many, having returned to his hometown after he left the country in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. With a doctorate from Switzerland, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at a combined Harvard-MIT biomedical engineering center before joining Tufts University two decades ago. A specialist in ophthalmology equipment, he created Tufts’s biomedical engineering program and helped launch its biomedical engineering department in 2003. Vo accepted a professorship at International University, where he founded the biomedical engineering department that now oversees about 60 students. “This is a good time,” Vo said. “Medical device consumption here is huge, while the local supply is almost nonexistent.” He expects a growing demand for his graduates, even if it takes a while for Vietnam to kick off its growth.

In 2008, Vietnam reached a per capita income of $1,000, the lower end of the World Bank’s middle-income range. The new wealth is collecting in urban areas, where factories and slums are swelling against luxurious high-rises. But if Vietnamese universities don’t quickly churn out enough engineers and scientists, says a 2009 government report, the Vietnam dream will fall flat.

Economists call it the “middle income trap.” In this scenario — which has been taking its toll on Thailand and Malaysia — poor countries become too reliant on cheap labor and offshoring. They have trouble making the leap upward, that is, creating an educated workforce that can research and design its own products. Vietnam’s successful neighbors, such as Singapore and South Korea, invested heavily in universities and science to pull themselves out of the trap. Today, Samsung and LG are world leaders in the mobile phone and television industries.

It also appears Vietnam is following a Chinese model of economic growth that emphasizes education, said Wolf Rieck, the president of the Vietnamese-German University. “There seems to be a connection between Vietnam’s strategy to develop the econo
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