Slovenian technology continues to impress
Mateja Lampe Rupnik, CEO of Red Pitaya, a Slovenian tech company that has made a name for itself internationally by designing open-source, high-performance measurement and control systems used by institutions like CERN, NASA, and MIT, discusses the need for more university-industry partnerships in Slovenia in an opinion piece, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.
Slovenia is one of the best-kept secrets in modern technology. Our impressive record is little-known, even in our small Alpine country. One of the pioneers of modern spaceflight, for example, was Slovenian. Herman Potočnik was an electronics engineer and military officer, and he is considered to be one of the fathers of aeronautics for his work on spaceflight. His theories, after being steadfastly checked by human computers, made it possible for the astronauts to land on the moon (armed with a guidance computer many thousands of times less powerful than your iPhone). A few years later, subsequent visits to space would get easier, as another Slovenian engineer, Dr. France Rode, brought the world the first pocket calculator.
These Slovenians are two of many technologists from our country who have contributed to significant scientific and technological advancements. The reason they are lesser known, however, may be just what makes them particularly great: Our culture of practicality and modesty. After all, we are a small country surrounded by powerful neighbours. Our flexibility gives us independence; remaining measured about our achievements keeps that independence unthreatened. As technologists ourselves, we see every day how Slovenian talent represents this still - namely, they are focused on "what to build", not "how to promote ourselves."
Slovenian tech talent is, indeed, building. The IT sector in Slovenia is a standout performer in terms of added value to the country, significantly surpassing the national business average. This sector was supercharged by the innovation of the early 2000s and the growth of our startup sector. Slovenian entrepreneurs heavily relied on smaller forms of fundraising, including crowdfunding/Kickstarters and accelerators, as they were more accessible than venture capital. This funding made it possible for them to scale beyond their home country. It's possible this tendency of migration is endemic to Slovenia's technological history (even Rode went to university in the United States before relocating to California to work for Hewlett Packard). The thinking goes, for Slovenian inventors to make a larger impact, they must look further afield. We experienced this expectation ourselves at Red Pitaya (we remain, however, proudly Slovenia-based).
Yet, it is possible this movement of Slovenian innovation and technology abroad is what makes our country lesser-known by its impressive credentials. We know from our own work that Slovenian technology is relied upon by the world's leading technological universities including ETH Zurich, MIT, Caltech, and Princeton for research, in areas ranging from finding more affordable technologies to replace magnetic resonance, to gravitational wave science, to even building quantum computers.
These are great accomplishments. It would be even greater for some of them to be happening inside Slovenia as well. This culture of innovation, starting at our universities, would be the jumpstart we need to improve our startup ecosystem and reinvigorate our engineering workforce, especially among women and young people.
Universities in Slovenia excel at education and instilling technical skills, giving high priority to students to focus on publicly funded research. However, we could further expand our global impact (and GDP) by also prioritizing educating students on entrepreneurship and product development. This would foster a culture of innovation and accelerate the development of cutting-edge products. Stronger, in-university partnerships that put students directly in touch with industry could also counteract the "brain drain" of our inventors to other countries, including other European nations that are investing heavily into their startup ecosystems. Some of them are even our neighbours - while our start-up ecosystem was strong in the early 2000s, we now have other Balkan nations like Croatia and Serbia aiming for this title. We need these university-industry partnerships to stay competitive regionally as well as globally.
More university-industry partnership would also mean that Slovenian students could see directly what companies here are doing, as well as provide them with the resources to pursue their own groundbreaking innovations. Not only should this encourage our students to stay in Slovenia, it should also help improve the number of young people and women who want to study technology, engineering, and other STEM fields. At least, it should be enough to attract more venture capital and grant funding to Slovenian startups and innovators so they can hire, scale, and even be acquired from Slovenia. These success stories, in turn, give our future students inspiration to learn from.
For now, however, Slovenian students can look up to the many engineers that came before them. One such example crosses above their heads every 90 minutes - the International Space Station. Slovenian technology has been aboard before, monitoring the air quality for its astronauts. Slovenian technology is also being used in another NASA-sponsored project at an American university to develop radiation detectors for other forms of spaceflight. Still, not many Slovenians know that in the 1990s, a proposal was floated for the ISS to be named after Herman Potočnik. A high honor, and well-earned, given his highly detailed design of an orbiting spacecraft above Earth was the first of its kind, and inspired the ISS as we know it today. While the proposal didn't move forward, it still serves as a powerful reminder that humanity itself is pushed forward by Slovenian innovation.
