The international workshop on “”Building a network of overseas Vietnamese experts” was organised by the Management Board of the project Fostering innovation through research, science, and technology - FIRST (Ministry of Science and Technology)on 24-26 June 2015 in Quang Ninh. The Workshop saw the presence of Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Viet Thanh, Chairman of Association for Liaison with Overseas Vietnamese Nguyen Phu Binh, Manager of FIRST Tran Quoc Thang, and experts from America, Japan, France, England, Australia, Singapore…

The international workshop on “”Building a network of overseas Vietnamese experts” was organised by the Management Board of the project Fostering innovation through research, science, and technology - FIRST (Ministry of Science and Technology)on 24-26 June 2015 in Quang Ninh. The Workshop saw the presence of Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Viet Thanh, Chairman of Association for Liaison with Overseas Vietnamese Nguyen Phu Binh, Manager of FIRST Tran Quoc Thang, and experts from America, Japan, France, England, Australia, Singapore…

At the Workshop, over 20 presented reports focused on clarifying the key points in building and operating the network of overseas Vietnamese experts in an effective and stable way. According to statistics, 400,000 in nearly 4 million Vietnamese people in Vietnam who are living abroad have university degrees or higher. Many of them are experts of different fields, working in abroad universities, research institutes or big companies. On average, about 200 overseas Vietnamese come back Vietnam for teaching, carrying out general research projects as well as technology transfer projects, cooperation on investment and development. This is a very valuable source of gray matter that Vietnam needs to attract and promote.

Speaking at the Workshop, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Viet Thanh said that, many policies had been developed to attract overseas Vietnamese intellectuals, but the results were still not commensurate with the potential. It is also shown in reality that the lookup tools, the data and information sources at present are rather sketchy; therefore, overseas Vietnameseintellectuals still encounter many obstacles in accessing and understanding the situation of Vietnam while the local scientific organisations and firms can not access to foreign professionals in a systematic way. This requires the urgent needs of building more effective models of cooperation, more specialised methods of connecting information. The opinions given at the Workshop will make an important contribution to create this renovation.