Recently, I heard that a great city acts like a revolving door: it lets in talent and ushers it out.
Ambitious workers move to great cities seeking opportunities to accelerate their careers and lives. After accruing some wealth and experience, they also eventually leave to return to their hometowns or to search for new opportunities elsewhere. There is a natural turnover of smart people in great cities such as New York and San Francisco. But how does a city attract these top minds in the first place?
The Great Value of Immigrants
Today, more than 3 million New Yorkers were not originally born in the United States, or about 37% of the overall city population. The immigrant population in New York is now greater than the entire population of Chicago. Furthermore, New York is currently experiencing its highest immigrant density rate in more than 100 years, which is startling for a city known historically as a haven for immigration. Now add to this all the US-born folks moving to New York each year from elsewhere in the country. This data indicates a strong shared perception that there are opportunities in New York that make it worthwhile to move there, even if only for a few years.
Like in New York, immigrants continue to play a major role in Silicon Valley. There, 37% of residents were also not born in the United States. About 60% of those immigrants were born in Asia. According to the Kauffman Foundation, immigrants are 2x more likely to become entrepreneurs than US-born Americans. Additionally, Stanford historian Leslie Berlin estimates that between 1995 and 2005, more than 50% of founders of technology companies were not born in the United States, some of which companies have generated billions of dollars of value like Google and eBay.
The influx of immigrants is a virtuous circle. Once a newcomer has a positive experience in a great city like New York or San Francisco, he will spread the word to his friends upon his return to his hometown. In turn, this pollination inspires the most determined locals to leave their cities in search of opportunity. This is how New York and Silicon Valley continue, every year, to attract impressive numbers of talented people ready to put their noses to the grindstone.
So what would it take for city like Montreal to attract more of this entrepreneurial immigrant population and become a true magnet for talent?
Revisions to visa and immigration policies could make attracting talent easier to Quebec and Canada. We could encourage talented expatriates to rediscover and move back to Quebec. We could build out modern transportation links to better connect our city to other thriving hubs. However, I believe we must look at education first.
Universities Play a Key Role
Montreal is the 2nd ranked city in North America (after Boston) in terms of university student density, boasting more than 220,000 students. We have an absolute advantage that we can exploit.
Beyond the exceptional quality of life in Quebec (including in particular a relatively low cost of living and an array of affordable social services), we must ask ourselves if we currently offer the right set of opportunities to attract and retain the best young graduates in Montreal. Are our major Quebec companies and rapidly growing start-ups offering world-class career opportunities? Are salaries for these jobs competitive with those in Ontario or the United States? Are there enough promising academic and scientific projects to entice our best graduates to stay for a few years? If not, top grads will elect to move elsewhere.
Also, how can our universities stand out even more on the world stage at the admissions stage to attract the best? In his classic 2006 article How to Be Silicon Valley, American venture investor Paul Graham analyzed Silicon Valley’s key success factors and argues that having a world-class university (on par with MIT, Stanford or Harvard) is an indispensable factor to set off the “chain reaction” required to create a technology hub such as Silicon Valley.
Graham even goes so far as to suggest offering a $3 million signing bonus to the world’s 200 most talented professors to entice them to change universities and move to a new city. This would in turn attract their research assistants and the best students. For $600 million, we could have one of the best universities in the world and a true talent magnet that would regenerate over the years. It is a rather radical idea, but we’ll need ideas like this in order to stand out on the world stage in coming years.
Attracting the Cream of the Crop
As part of the reent Philagora event, celebrating 50 years of the J. Armand Bombardier Foundation, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Gabriel Bran-Lopez, president and founder of the Fusion Jeunesse organization. Gabriel asked me this question: “If you were a social entrepreneur, which single challenge would you focus on?” I replied: “talent”.
Quebec faces many social challenges today. Health. Environment. Education. As I suggested last year at C2-MTL, there are still many “broken” experiences in all of these areas. In entrepreneur-speak: opportunities for change everywhere. That said, I think that attracting and retaining talent is a shared issue that is potentially transcendent to many specific problems in these areas. In other words, if we succeed in attracting and retaining the best people in Montreal, I think that most of these situations will be resolved at a much faster pace.
I think engineering talent is particularly key in solving these issues. As I’ve mentioned before, I think we need at least 10,000 more engineers. In that article, I laid out a few elements that could be part of our gameplan to deepen our talent pool, but we need a broader concerted effort.
If we want to build a vibrant world-class city and address our social challenges head-on, I believe it starts with a world-class, creative and ambitious talent strategy.
[Note: This article was originally published in Les Affaires].