Building a Nation of Engineers from the Provinces
Indonesia often discusses the shortage of engineers as a national problem: how many engineers per million population, how many engineering graduates are produced, or how many engineering doctorates are available.
For a country as large as Indonesia, I believe the question needs to be reversed. It is not only how many engineers Indonesia has, but whether every province has an engineering ecosystem capable of solving its own economic and industrial problems.
We can treat each province like a ‘small engineering country’. This does not mean provinces stand alone, but rather that each builds a complete chain of capabilities: vocational schools and vocational education produce skilled workers; polytechnics produce technicians and applied engineers; universities produce engineers and researchers; while industry provides real problems, production facilities, apprenticeships, and markets for the technologies produced.
China’s experience shows why a regional approach makes sense. Wang, Sutherland, Ning, and Pan (2015) studied China’s regional innovation systems at the provincial level and found that provinces developed in different patterns, more explorative, exploitative, or relatively balanced. This means China’s national innovation capability did not grow uniformly, but was composed of various regional systems with their own characteristics.
Li (2015), using data from 29 manufacturing industries in 30 province-level regions of China, also found that industrial specialisation is linked to innovation, but the benefits depend on the quality of regional institutions.
So simply building industrial estates is not enough. What is needed is labour mobility, functioning institutions, knowledge networks, and relationships between companies and sources of technological capability. Chi and Qian (2010) even found a strong positive relationship between the higher education of the workforce and provincial innovation activity measured using per capita invention patent applications.
India provides a parallel lesson. Sharma, Nookala, and Sharma (2012) showed that India’s regional innovation systems can be understood through the relationships between industrial firms, educational and research institutions, and innovation parks. The study by Vedhathiri and Ramadass (2020) on Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura also showed the importance of polytechnics and engineering colleges in providing technicians and engineers to support regional industrialisation.
Indonesia is not actually starting from zero. Kusharsanto, Handayani, and Artiningsih (2017) showed that Semarang and Balikpapan have already applied a regional innovation system approach, although integration among actors remains a challenge. What we need to do is make the concept far more engineering-oriented.
Each province can choose two to five engineering missions based on its economic structure. West Java can deepen aerospace, railway, electronics, and advanced manufacturing.
The Riau Islands can develop electronics manufacturing and marine engineering. East Kalimantan can focus on mining, energy, and infrastructure engineering. South Sulawesi can build maritime and fisheries engineering.
Success should not be measured only by the number of engineering graduates. Measure how many technicians and engineers actually work in engineering functions, how much industrial R&D activity there is, apprenticeships, shared laboratories, patents, new products, and technologies successfully mastered.
In this way, Indonesia does not need to build one giant engineering centre. We can build 38 interconnected technological learning machines. The policy question then changes: not ‘how many engineers do we have?’, but ‘what engineering capabilities are truly alive, working, and continuously reproducing in every province?’