One cannot copy and paste ecosystems such as Silicon Valley or Berlin in Lithuania, Skinner Layne, the founder of Exosphere Academy, an alternative university for science, technology, and entrepreneurship, suggests. Instead, he says, we should focus on our strengths nobody else could copy. And the acute talent gap that made Vinted close is marketing department in Vilnius could be filled by importing creative minds and extending our fresh Startup Visa scheme into a Creative Economy Visa.

It has been recently announced that Vinted, Lithuania’s most successful startup with 50+ M EUR raised, is moving 15% of its workforce from Vilnius to Berlin quoting the lack of experienced business/product developers and marketers with international experience as the main reason.

And so we asked Skinner Layne, a speaker at this year’s LOGIN Startup Fair, how he would suggest nurturing and raising required talent in short, mid and long terms in a country such as Lithuania.

So are there any shortcuts?

Skinner Layne: The first and most important change that is required to build the kind of Startup and Technology ecosystem that Lithuania has the potential to have is a change of mindset. It is human nature to compare oneself to others, and this natural tendency scales up to organizations and countries, too. But it is damaging and arrests even the possibility of progress because these sort of comparisons usually focus on the things that the other has that oneself does not. So it's easy to say "Berlin has this and this that we don't have, so let's get those things and be competitive with Berlin." This sort of behavior has led a lot of cities and countries to spend vast sums of money attempting to copy Silicon Valley, but with no success. That's because it's simply impossible to copy another person, organization, or country's success. There's no room for imitation.

The practical implications of this are that Lithuania needs to look at itself, and assess its strengths, and play to those more aggressively, carving out its own unique niche doing one thing extremely well that nobody else can copy. Essentially, this means seeing where there is the potential for a "natural monopoly" and exploiting that to the maximum.

What would you see as Lithuania’s strengths?

Skinner Layne: Lithuania is well positioned in the middle of two worlds: Europe, and Russia. This positioning has historically been considered a negative trait, and put Lithuania in the middle of unpleasant global political maneuvering. But it can simultaneously be spun as an advantage. There are tremendous pools of technical talent in the Russian-speaking world (not only in Russia) who would like to live in the European Union. Lithuania can provide that bridge. There are many Russian startups that would like to scale up their businesses in the EU markets–Lithuania could specialize in internationalizing Russian startups.

A second advantage of the country that is not sufficiently exploited is that it is very inexpensive to live there if one has a foreign-sourced income. Transforming Vilnius and Kaunas into freelancing hubs is one way to attract pools of talent in advance that can later be used for scale-ups happening in the local ecosystem.

Third, it seems that Lithuania needs to choose a specialty and really try to build expertise in that one area. Because of the access to under-utilized regional talent that the Baltic region uniquely has, it is my view that this specialty should be Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. There is still a window of about 5-10 years for new entries into the AI arms race, and the incumbent players by no means have a lock on the market. Lithuania has a natural advantage because of its advanced telecommunications infrastructure and relatively low cost of living. This means it can be unusually competitive even against Silicon Valley firms with tremendous resources.

What is the role of government, businesses, startups and other stakeholders in fostering Lithuania’s creative ecosystem?

Skinner Layne: All of the stakeholders need to have a more creative approach to transforming the economic and lifestyle landscape for collective success in the Creative Economy. Government, corporate employers, universities, and entrepreneurs all have a role to play in reorienting the Lithuanian economy for success under this paradigm.

The government's role should be to remove as many barriers as possible to people settling in Lithuania. The Startup Visa should be expanded to be a "Creative Economy Visa", enabling long-term residence and a pathway to citizenship for people who are not traditionally employed and who are not necessarily connected with a Startup, but who work as freelancers and independent contractors and have the technical and creative skills Lithuania needs for its ecosystem. This is the most important step the Lithuanian government can take, as it is a way to take advantage of market imbalances and "geoarbitrage" without any cost to the country, and only benefit. It would bring more money to be spent on local businesses without taking any jobs from Lithuanians. There are few win-win scenarios as compelling as this one for a small country like Lithuania to create a disproportionate competitive advantage in talent acquisition.

As there are currently almost no countries in the world enabling this kind of immigration possibility, Lithuania could attract technical and design talent from all over the world, forming the necessary critical mass for startups needing to scale, and potentially avoiding the exodus of startups once they reach a certain size.

Government should also cautious to prevent a rapid explosion of population in Vilnius which would stress its current infrastructure and drive up costs to the point of it no longer being advantageous enough to prefer it over Berlin. Lithuania has the special benefit of having a second city with developed infrastructure and history that the country's growth can be more strategically balanced between Vilnius and Kaunas, with more effort being placed on linking the two cities with better transportation infrastructure that also allows the space between the two cities to spring up as an intercity suburban development, helping ensure the cost of housing in both cities remains low.

Both government and enterprise should join forces to drive regional infrastructure development utilizing financial support from the European Union to create deeper interconnections with Lithuania's neighbors. High speed rail, or even a hyperloop, connecting Riga and Warsaw to Kaunas, with a rapid transport between Kaunas and Vilnius, would revolutionize the Baltic region, and Lithuania would be the hub connecting them. This infrastructure could later be expanded to link Vilnius directly with Minsk and Moscow and Kaunas with Kaliningrad. Not only would this advance the goals outlined above, but it would forge commercial ties that would have the effect of lowering the threats currently felt by the Baltics with respect to Russia. Peace through commerce has been a historically successful proposition, and Lithuanian leaders could make their mark on history by not only transforming their country to be a leader in technology and entrepreneurship, but also in improving international relations and reducing conflict in the region.