I attended a lunch yesterday hosted by Enterprise Ireland in the Westin St. Francis Hotel off Union Square in San Francisco. It’s a beautiful old hotel (built in 1904) from the street level, but you realize that you’re not in the old quarters when the elevator opens on the 32nd floor! The Enterprise Ireland team did a nice job gathering some top Irish companies in one room. I spent the afternoon chatting with people from Riverdeep, ChangingWorlds, and Openet - the theme of the event was facing up to the challenges of doing business today as a company based in Ireland and operating in the U.S. The lunch was led by Noel Dempsey, an Irish government representative with the long title of Minister for Marine, Communications, and Natural Resources (the joke being that he should get three salaries for doing three jobs). I’m thinking of expanding my own title as a result…

Several shared business issues came up during the event, not least the constant demand for qualified computer science graduates in Ireland. Although the Irish education system is generally well regarded around the world, several of us expressed the concern that it suffers from complacency and lack of innovation today. From personal experience, I know that InnerWorkings is always looking for qualified VB and C# developers and the Irish universities just aren’t producing enough talent to meet the need. I’m guessing that our R&D facility in Dublin is typical of many Irish start-ups, with an energetic mix of nationalities and personalities from all over the world. This influx of programming talent from abroad allows our company to continue driving product innovation and it underlines the fact that Dublin has become a very desirable (albeit expensive) place to live. This isn’t news to anyone living in San Francisco, by the way…

Certainly, Ireland is not alone in the challenge to recruit and retain highly qualified software engineers. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, went public in the San Francisco Chronicle last week about the need to increase the quota of immigrant work visas in the U.S. If skilled immigration is not increased, McNealy made the very descriptive observation that “there will be a great sucking sound of innovation out of the U.S.” Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr makes a good point when he poses the following scenario: “Imagine innovation in America without Andy Grove, without Jerry Yang, without Sergey Brin — Hungarian, Chinese, Russian. These immigrants have contributed enormously to innovation and our well-being.”  In an eWeek interview last year, Bill Gates went on the record about his concerns over staffing Microsoft’s product groups with top talent: “I’m very worried about it,” Gates said. “Microsoft is trying to hire every great college graduate that has computer science skills.”

As the Enterprise Ireland lunch finished up yesterday, the general consensus was that governments need to invest in both home-grown talent and encouraging skilled immigration. If the doors to recruiting new talent are closed by a country’s legal or educational systems, innovation suffers and companies lose the ability to compete at the highest level. And let’s face it - it’s a lot more fun to have a chief solution architect who hails from Genoa. Isn’t that right, Claudio?

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