If we have top notch infrastructure and and technologically adept human resource, the manufacturing industry would come to us naturally, no?
The other (third) ingredient would be
affordable labor - sometimes easily trainable semi-skilled or unskilled labor for low value addition items.
You can get skilled middle class labor for producing cheap high-tech items like cellphones (as is evident locally now with Walton and other companies) or for providing cheap high-tech back-office services (like they do next door) but that is middle-grade value addition where the upward trajectory can be steep. Entrenched players there like India and China and it is a saturated market for value addition.
So utilizing and competing with a 'technologically adept human resource' advantage for Bangladesh will be a tough uphill battle against these entrenched players unless labor cost component is a big part of the production cost.
There are some sectors such as lower end backoffice services where price sensitivity is rather high, such as call centers and basic services like preparing taxes etc. Those can be targeted as Pakistani firms are doing at this time.
Bangladesh has certain niche advantages in software development that other countries do not possess, such as game development, CGI processing, software and mobile application development in languages such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Swedish etc. There are already local exporter firms involved into those niche fields.
So to make a long story short - lower-rung semi-skilled and unskilled value-addition using affordable labor for producing garments, shoes, leather items, toys, small electrical goods, cheap metal DIY tools (and even shipbuilding)
is where the money is. Think of items that are found in a dollar store or pound shop. That is your volume target market from Bangladesh and
that is where Bangladesh holds a labor cost advantage.
Our 30 billion yearly garments-only exports will essentially be tripled if we went into all these lower value-addition export categories as China labor rates are slowly rising beyond sustainable limit. In fact many Chinese factories have already started transferring their export operations to Bangladesh.
This is OT to discuss in this thread. Let's discuss in another relevant thread.