Serbia’s digital industry driving sustainable development

With over 90 percent of its members’ businesses tied into foreign markets in the EU, the Middle East and North America, its strategic objective – to increase the “visibility of Serbia ICT and put Nov Sad on the regional and European map as the hotbed for ICT in this part of the world” - is one that makes a lot of sense. 

It was not always that way. 

In 2011, Milan Solaja, Vojvodina ICT Cluster's energetic chief executive, became exasperated with the lack of media understanding of how important information technology was to Serbia as an export market. 

“You journalists should pay more attention to what is going on,” he told reporters attending a Danube IT Conference in Novi Sad. 

“Everyone is writing about the Serbian export of raspberries as a huge national success, and nobody knows that we export more software than raspberries.” 

Recalling the incident in 2018, Mr Solaja – a fluent English speaker who began informally learning the language as a boy keen to know what the lyrics of songs by the Beatles were all about - noted that “the very next day, there was this big headline: ‘Serbia Exports More Software than Raspberries!’ and raspberries have been fused to software topics in the media ever since.” 

The European Training Foundation last caught up with Milan – as he prefers visitors to the ICT Cluster to call him – a year or so before the pandemic shut down human interaction, but accelerated the role of information and communications technology in education and business. 

Then, the Vojvodina’s ICT Cluster’s members – 35 at the time – counted 4,000 professionals on their books. Today the business-education/education business organisation has double that number. 

What has not changed is the passion and dedication to the mission that Milan and his organisation have always personified, remaining a passionate advocate for the role that IT businesses can play in supporting Serbia’s economic and educational development.  

Putting IT and software at the heart of national development under the slogan Digital Serbia – as he told the ETF back in January 2017 - has only become more important in the tumultuous years since. 

Vojvodina ICT Cluster stopped to take stock in June 2021, when at a regional “3B” event of the the Balkan, Baltic and Black Sea region of ICT clusters, business and educational professionals in the field noted that, “the impact of the pandemic has varied significantly across different industries, accelerating fundamental shifts in the landscape of the IT industry.” 

The conference aimed to take stock of the regional situation in “digitalisation, innovation and emerging technologies during and post COVID-19.” 

Looking into that post-pandemic future, specialists from the region also looked at identifying “potential for cooperation between the ICT industry, as well as how the IT industry can encourage more traditional sectors to become the economies of the future, and enhance global cooperation with the macro-region in Eastern Europe.” 

This readiness to respond to the swiftly changing world of ICT has long characterised Vojvodina’s approach: one of the latest forums the cluster took part in was in February (2022) when a regional IT co-design conference considered various scenarios for the future. 

A collaboration between the University of Novi Sad and the Vojvodina ICT Cluster, a Zoom-based event, was organised under the umbrella of the WBC-RRI – a regional EU funded body that promotes responsible research and innovation. 

The conference, attended by 31 participants including the university and ICT cluster speakers, considered a range of paths to the future – from the positive to the challenging. 

In an introduction to the event, Professor Goran Stojanović, of Novi Sad University, noted that, while Western Balkan Countries (WBC) had demonstrated improved research and innovation capacities, there was "still progress to be made to meet the rest of the EU on equal terms."

The WBC-RRI.NET project, he noted, aimed to boost research and innovation in the region by "adopting a sustainable development framework based on responsible research and innovation principles at the local level."

Through encouraging debate and openness, the "goal of a single, borderless European Research Area was in reach", he told participants.

By engaging business and education in such a debate, and informing the general public of the benefits that ICT can bring to communities and economic development, impacts that include "the digital gap and regional brain drain of ICT experts" could be addressed, he suggested.

The conference discussed four possible future scenarios for the development of ICT in the region in the next two years:

• Profile and reputation flourish - a vision of an improvement, by 2024, of the "profile and skills of staff (human resources) in the region" helped by wider public engagement; a situation where "regional stakeholders" had "fully recognised the importance of increasing cross-sectoral cooperation and employing multidisciplinary approaches." Such a vision would see increased job opportunities, and "bring Vojvodina's approach closer to European values."
• Empty Cooperation - although good cooperation between academia and industry has been achieved, the profile of ICT, education institutions and staff is low. This is the result of a failure to invest in good career paths and structures in both sectors. Failure to address the brain drain of the brightest and best has contributed to this situation. A "poor reputation for R&I stakeholders, as well as for the R&D companies" means that invitations to international consortia dry up.
• Good Isolated Islands - there are "several individuals in the R&I field who are eager to develop their own careers, but are not willing to collaborate and establish new networks among the various sectors and fields." Pay gaps between academia and ICT professionals results in "jealousy" and division. The potential for continuing to build synergies is gradually lost.
• Black Hole - the "profile and reputation of staff and institutions on Vojvodina gradually becomes low." Networking and cooperation disappear. Industry and SMEs, due to "political and economic instability" withdraw from the market. Brain drain has never been higher.

Vojvodina’s CEO, Milan – who addressed the conference about “education as a solution for scenarios that do not have positive outcomes to industry or academia” was, along with his colleagues, relieved that conference participants voted by a majority for “Good Isolated Islands” as the most realistic scenario.