"Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World" by Devesh Kapur and John McHale, the book recently mentioned in the New York Times article, illustrates best the multi-dimensional issues surrounding brain drain in a way that breaks us out of the simplistic thinking of having polarized views, either the laissez-faire attitude of "brain circulation will happen" or protectionist "globalization is damaging the local economy" answers. It is exactly the complexity of brain drain effects that makes this go beyond a black-or-white stand, and very different from issues of poverty, environment, human rights, health or equality.

I have also come to a decision point in my project that, because of the complexity and macro-economic level of this concern, I am moving my efforts from an intention based community portal towards directly helping in building capacity in the areas of concern.

The reason for the decision is that the target community, the diaspora, need more than just a communication platform. The value proposition of a social network needs to go beyond building connections which the Internet naturally provides. I have, instead, decided to start on a project that the diaspora, the local academia and the local business community can work together, and this project will be the concrete bridge in lieu of a virtual one.

My project is now about building capacity through technology business incubation. It is going to be an embedded magnet tech incubator. 'Embedded' because it will be using the university as its base, leveraging on the potential of an academic institution to drive innovation, and, at the same time, provide the university with the opportunity to teach real-world technopreneurship. 'Magnet' because its primary mission is to build companies for the purpose of generating jobs for new graduates and alumni.

The challenge now is to get the University and the Chamber of Commerce back home to commit to this vision, and recognize the value of such an effort towards building an ICT ecosystem.

Planning the processes and policies of this technology incubator will be the easy part, with resources on the Net on successful incubators, such as Capetown's Bandwidth Barn. The challenge lies in breaking through the risk-averse mindset of my target sponsors and key stakeholders. It is going to be a challenge that is going to require partnerships with individuals and associations to demonstrate backing and support.

The innovative technology component of this project is going to be the "seed" product that this tech incubator, and the university's technopreneurship program, will build, support, and benefit from, which is, an open-source service-oriented component-based ERP portal package.

Open-Source: Students in the university will collectively contribute business components that will build on an ERP system that SME's in the area can use for free, and supported by graduates of the university with experience on building and using the platform. The university will support this project in its potential to build reputation capital, thus putting issues of R&D ROI aside.

This will also address maintainability, since the development of components, such as accounting or human resource modules, will be integrated into the university's curriculum to allow for continuous development.

Service-Oriented: The target users go beyond the SME's. The application itself is going to be multi-user, which will allow many companies to use the same installation privately and securely. It creates an opportunity for an added source of revenue to ISP's and web hosts looking to provide more value to its subscribers. This software-as-service approach is what will allow SME's to afford business applications at lower cost. This model can further accelerate the adoption of the platform.

Component-based: ERP's have always had limited success in SME's due to its complexity. With this package being component-based, users can decide which modules they'd like to activate and use on a regular basis.

This open-source component-based service-oriented ERP portal package will be built using the J2EE technology stack.

I foresee a greater level of software-as-service adoption as this online gaming generation graduates to the business world, with a mindset that paying for rent for software use is natural, sensible and economical.