Order of European Inventors and Innovators
Whenever the diaspora is discussed as a resource, a large figure is quoted and a general conclusion is drawn. The figure is real, the conclusion is usually useless. Finer data say something else, and something useful.
What the data show
According to an OECD review, in 2015/2016 about 3.6 million people born in Romania were living in OECD countries — roughly 17% of everyone born in Romania. Romania had the fifth largest diaspora relative to its domestic population and the highest emigration rate among the ten main countries of origin.
The largest communities: Italy, over one million; Germany, 680,000; Spain, 573,000.
The figure that matters, and why it is hidden
About 23% of Romanian emigrants in OECD countries held tertiary qualifications — eleven percentage points below the foreign-born average. Read alone, that figure looks like bad news.
But the average hides everything interesting. Broken down by destination, the share with higher education looks like this: Canada, nearly 80%. The United States, 54%. France and the United Kingdom, around 35%. Italy, 7%.
The same diaspora, the same country of origin, a difference of more than tenfold between destinations.
What this means for the circulation of ideas
It means that “the diaspora” is not one thing and cannot be addressed with one message. The bridge for technical ideas is not the diaspora in general — it is a particular part of it, in particular places, where Romanian emigration is concentrated at the highly qualified end.
The practical consequence is uncomfortably simple: a general appeal to “Romanians everywhere” misses by construction. A link with Romanian researchers in Canadian or American universities is an action with an address, achievable with small resources and producing verifiable results.
What a bridge can concretely do
It can say what the problem looks like from the inside. A Romanian engineer in a German firm knows what that firm buys and why. That information is in no market study available to an inventor in Romania.
It can validate early. Half an hour of conversation with someone working in the field can spare six months of development in a closed direction.
It can open the right door. Not “connections” in the old sense, but simply knowing whom to ask.
It can send back the method, not only the person. The diaspora debate is usually conducted in terms of return. But what returns most easily is not people — it is practices: how a laboratory is organised, how a patent application is written so that it holds, what an evaluation process looks like when it does not punish novelty.
What does not help
Emotional appeals without a concrete request. Someone who left fifteen years ago, with a career and a family there, does not answer a call to patriotism; they answer a precise question they can answer and that nobody else has asked them.
That is perhaps the only recommendation that matters: do not summon the diaspora. Ask it something.
Source: OECD, “Talent Abroad: A Review of Romanian Emigrants”.