Having spent more than three decades building businesses across different industries and regions, I have learned that talent challenges look different depending on where you stand. What emerges consistently is that businesses optimise for today’s needs, while sustainable ecosystems require investment in tomorrow’s capacity.
At Evocabank in Armenia, when we shifted to a digital-first model, we needed people who understood both technology and trust. In my advisory role in Green Rock’s development projects in Dilijan, we needed specialists who saw infrastructure not just as construction but as community building. Each business required distinct expertise, yet each also exposed the same structural constraint. Businesses hire to fill roles. They rarely have the mandate, timeline, or resources to build broader professional capacity in a region.
What businesses cannot do alone
The logic of business is tight and immediate. You hire for a position, within a budget, to deliver specific results. This works well for operational needs. It breaks down when you need to build something more fundamental: a community of professionals who choose to invest their careers in a place, not just complete a project.
Through Keron Foundation, we developed a response to this gap. The Talent Pool Programme focuses on attracting highly qualified professionals from various countries to contribute to Armenia’s development across five strategic fields: education, culture, sports, healthcare and territorial development. The goal is to create conditions for people to not just work in Armenia, but to live, work and create here.
Within the first phase, five professionals from the US, France, Estonia and Spain relocated to Armenia, bringing expertise to the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra and other cultural institutions. But what matters more than the number is the structure: these individuals committed to staying, teaching, and integrating into the community. That kind of commitment requires a different value proposition entirely.
The foundation model for talent
Foundations operate on different logic than businesses. They can afford patience. They can invest in outcomes that take years to materialise. They can support people and projects that do not fit neatly into a business plan but contribute to the ecosystem those businesses depend on.
This is not philanthropy in the traditional sense. It is infrastructure building, except the infrastructure is human capacity rather than physical systems. When a business hires an expert from abroad, that expertise leaves when the contract ends. When a foundation helps that expert build a life and a teaching practice, the expertise stays and multiplies.
I have watched this pattern repeat across different contexts. Businesses can identify talent needs with precision. They can offer competitive terms. What they struggle to convey is the fuller picture: that choosing to build your life in a new place becomes transformative for both sides. The professional gains purpose, community and the opportunity to shape something meaningful. The place gains not just expertise but someone invested in its future. That mutual transformation cannot be reduced to compensation negotiations.
Foundations can do this work precisely because they are not bound by quarterly performance metrics or shareholder expectations. They can think in decades. They can absorb risk that would be irrational for a commercial entity. They can make investments that benefit an entire sector, not just a single balance sheet.
Why this pattern repeats across markets
This challenge is not unique to any single geography. Any ecosystem seeking to expand beyond its current capacity confronts the same fundamental question: how do you attract and retain talent when you are not yet the obvious destination? How do you build professional depth when you cannot yet offer the full network effects of established hubs?
The answer, I have learned, is not to compete with those hubs on their terms. It is to build parallel structures that address what businesses cannot. This means foundations that focus on talent integration, community building, and long-term professional development. It means accepting that these efforts will not show ROI in conventional terms, even as they create the conditions for conventional businesses to succeed.
What I have noticed across banking and development work is that talent follows talent. The first people who relocate take the most risk. They need more than a job offer. They need a reason to believe that others will follow, that infrastructure exists, that they are joining something with momentum. Foundations provide that initial gravitational pull. Businesses benefit from it and reinforce it. But the sequence matters.
This is not a model that can be imposed from above or designed in advance. It emerges from the gap between what businesses need and what they can sustainably provide. That gap forces you to think about ecosystem building as a shared responsibility, not just a marketing phrase.
What I am observing is that businesses benefit when foundations exist alongside them. The foundations gain credibility when they can point to real economic activity and opportunity. The relationship appears symbiotic, though it requires accepting that different entities serve different timeframes and different logics. That acceptance, more than any specific programme design, is what creates the conditions for sustainable talent development.