The weakest link

The reliability, also known as measure of capacity of a system in order to fulfil what was planned, had a crucial boost in Nazi German. As other disciplines (operations research), this science rose under the pressure of war situation. 

The German concept was simple: the chain breakes because of its weakest link. For that reason, military research intend (through armaments) to identify the element more likely to fail, in order to reinforce it. 

Nowadays, we know that reliability involves analysis much more complex, probabilistic models and advanced simulation models. INESC TEC has a powerful specialization course in this kind of approaches and reputable international collaboration.

However, the German analysis has its advantages, because of its simplicity. It’s like a risk analysis. So this concept is appropriate to assess technological market in Portugal. This market entails a complex convergence of business initiative; researching; markets; money and labour. 

The national ability to research and transfer technology are one of the factors that drives a strong international attraction for technological investments in Portugal. The market is no longer national it became international. Investment exists and national science system has access to more diversified sources of financing. Labour, well… it is now the weakest link. 

This has nothing to do with unskilled labour. Labour is the weakest link because there aren’t enough workers, given the potential for activity provided by other factors. 

The problem is already critical and can be the cause of disruption, unfeasibility of projects and collapse, generating a recessive countermove, after a phase in which enterprises will try to catch the resources of each other – as if the problem didn’t exist. 

The need for Immigration Integration Programmes of people with technological capability or technological skills is clear when it is established that there is no time for the educational and scientific system to qualify the necessary people, nor is there even the human resource in our population that feed the training machine as required.