CESAR - the centre founded to stop people leaving

CESAR was founded in Recife in 1996 by three professors and researchers from the computing centre of the Federal University of Pernambuco - Silvio Meira, Ismar Kaufman and Fabio Silva - and its stated purpose was unusually concrete. It existed to bring the university's scientific output closer to what industry actually needed, and to keep qualified technology professionals in Pernambuco rather than watching them leave for other regions.

That second aim is the one worth dwelling on. The institution was created to stop a brain drain, which means it was founded on a diagnosis of a place rather than on a technology. Almost nothing in this catalogue is founded that way.

In 2000 it took part in creating Porto Digital, and became one of that park's anchor institutions. It runs a school, an experimentation laboratory, a research and development centre and a venture builder, with around six hundred staff and roughly a hundred million reais of revenue, and Silvio Meira remains its chief scientist.

The measurable answer to whether the intervention worked is a company. Tempest was incubated here in 2000, spun out in 2003, and is now part of a cybersecurity business valued in the hundreds of millions of reais. That is the same shape as the Campinas story elsewhere in this catalogue - a research institution placed deliberately, a cluster forming around it - with one difference worth noting: here the mechanism was explicit from the start. Retain the people, build the park, incubate the companies, let them go.