The IMD's Prof John Walsh fears Irish entrepreneurs will not be able to plug the gap if multinationals retrench, writes Nigel Stirling.
While the Republic's corporate landscape has been pockmarked at the whim of international investors of late, a visiting MBA expert has just lobbed a hand grenade into the ranks of its managerial classes.
Prof John Walsh last month brought to the Republic 44 company executives enrolled in the executive MBA course at Switzerland's prestigious International Institute for Management Development (IMD).
The four-day fact-finding mission - Walsh's ninth, and first to the Republic since 2000 - visited venture capitalists, government agencies and multinationals including Intel, Microsoft and Dell.
The aim: to find out what put the fire in the belly of the Celtic Tiger, and what challenges the final flushes of the economic boom present.
"What IMD's executive MBAs are being told is that many of the multinationals came for a well- educated, low-cost workforce; some came for the tax.
"But they stayed because they got value for money," says Finglas-born Walsh.
"Now as the cost of labour is increasing, the value has to go up too. The big discussion so far has tended to be as the Republic moves up the value chain . . . will multinationals move higher-value jobs here or will we have to rely on local firms to generate them?"
Walsh concedes this is an open question.
But he is fearful that the Irish entrepreneurial class - complacent after a decade of quick and easy profits from property speculation - cannot be relied upon to generate the number of native business start-ups needed if the multinationals retrench.
He said: "You have some people who have made a lot of money and are successful at starting off companies, but the fear I have is that the average man in the street figures buying a couple of semi-detached houses and renting them out is the way to make money.
"While that was true in the past, it certainly is not going to be true in the future.
"You need more entrepreneurial talent, more businesspeople; you need risk-takers."
If the number of Irish MBAs enrolled in Walsh's own class - one out of 70 last year - is any indicator, the prognosis is not good either.
Walsh says countries with similar sized economies to the Republic's - such as Finland and Denmark - traditionally are well represented on IMD's executive MBA courses.
"What business school in the Republic at the moment is in the top 50 in the world?
"I'm not saying that you need an MBA to be successful, but I would imagine that the number of MBAs here is lower than elsewhere. It is not essential but it is an indicator.
"The Republic has invested quite heavily in technical expertise but it has underinvested in management expertise.
"It is catching up now but I think it was neglected earlier and to some degree still is."
And while the one-time beacon of the Republic's executive education industry - Smurfit Business School - saw its placing drop to 98th out of 100 MBA programmes ranked by the Financial Times last year, Walsh feels the answer lies in cross-border MBAs.
"If you are in a small, open economy would you not want to educate your workforce in the places that you serve?"
And lest people think he was on a fishing trip, Walsh says he is not out to target Irish MBAs while here.
"We have people who serve the market for us . . . I think we would get our fair share of the market here, but it is just the market is so small.
"If there was interest here we would, but the amount of interest for a country of this size seems rather low, not just for us but our competitors too."
