Today is an historical day for me as Campus Principal, as the UWI St. Augustine hosts this Innovation Conference. Not that an Innovation Conference on this Campus is itself a flagship event, indeed we have had our share of seminars, workshops over the years, the most recent being a foresighting exercise in the Faculty of Engineering. What is significant about today, though, is the wide cross-section of participants from the public and private sectors, from academia, government, and from international agencies.
We come together with one common cause: the absolute imperative to increase Research, Development and Innovation in (RDI) Trinidad and Tobago.
I want to thank the Honourable Minister [Camille Robinson-Regis] for taking the time to participate in this important conversation on innovation and national development. When I shared my vision for the Campus with her some months after assuming Office as PVC and Campus Principal, she was very supportive of the Campus’ Innovation Imperative and I look forward to further engagements with her Ministry on this issue.
I want to especially thank the Economic Development Advisory Board for facilitating not just a conference but, really, an event that is a meeting of minds. Their catalytic role in pushing the innovation agenda deserves recognition.
DEFINITIONS
I want to ensure that we are the same page throughout this Conference by establishing a few definitions:
1. What is the Innovation Imperative? The Innovation imperative declares the following:
A necessary condition for sustainable development in the nation and the region is that our nations must re-create, must kick-start and must maintain their engines of wealth-creation by establishing effective National Innovation Systems (NIS) that would move original ideas and concepts to commercial reality.
An Innovation is a product or process that has satisfied two criteria: it has been created anew; and it has begun to produce returns on investment thus bringing value to society
An Innovation can be in the economic, social or ecological dimensions: the three dimensions of sustainable development. However, the economic dimension fuels the social and ecological dimensions. Wealth generation is necessary for sustainable development.
Innovation can occur at the individual level and at the corporate level. At one end of the innovation spectrum, it endows strong competitiveness in products and processes. However, at the opposite extreme it results in the creation of a novel product or process.
The adoption of a more aggressively innovative culture therefore makes for a more robustly creative citizen and, by virtue of its novelty characteristic, strengthens the ability of companies to compete internationally. It also increases the individual’s ability to develop SMEs for international markets, thus enabling a shift in our economy to one that is not unlike the German Mittlestand in which 500 1B Euro companies, 4,000 middle-performance companies and over 10 million SMEs each account for roughly a third of German foreign exports.
I propose that the Forex stratification of the Mittlestand provides a worthy reference model for our diversification drive.
I also propose that a high priority focus for the national education system is the production of graduates who would create the swarm of SMEs required to build the Trinbago Mittlestand. I estimate that we need 10 to 20 thousand export-earning SMEs.
2. Sustainable Development is development that maintains or improves the current state of society while ensuring that the sustainable existence and the needs of our descendants are not compromised. This requires focused activity in three dimensions: social, economic and ecological. Sustainable development should be the end game for any national development strategy.
CONTEXT
I would like now to set some context. A couple of weeks ago a member of staff came to me after I had spoken on the UWI Triple-A Strategic Plan to our staff and asked me if I had ever considered what universities would be like in 50 years. Around the same time, I received a request from the Rotary San Fernando South to speak on a similar topic. As I had no access to a crystal ball, I decided to frame my thoughts on two extreme scenarios for the future.
The worst-case scenario is total societal collapse as characterised by
natural disasters such as catastrophic earthquakes; eruptions; tsunamis, and climate-change effects; or man-made disasters such as over-population; economic stratification – the divide between rich and poor; poor ecology management; escalating crime; the “missing generation,” and ineffective economic policies.
Historical and theoretical data suggest that societal collapse, as a result of “man-made” disasters, is unavoidable, particularly when there is a high level of economic stratification.
At the other extreme, is the best-case, Utopian scenario with five characteristics.
- Governance and culture make man-made disasters almost impossible. We would have forged a society virtually free of the current ills, such as crime and all discrimination.
- In the face of natural disasters our citizens can survive as individuals or small groups and can build and maintain resilient communities that can grow to re-establish societies.
- We understand and respect the ecology and are effectively resourceful in protecting it.
- The economy would be buoyed by a robust Mittlestand-like structure, made so by an extremely healthy network of innovation-driven, export-oriented SMEs
- We would have achieved a sustainable existence.
TODAY’S REALITY
The St. Augustine Campus today looks nothing like it did in 1960; although some of the original buildings still dot our landscape. Lost too, is the heady idealism of those pre-Independence students from across the Caribbean. Our young people then had a focus and a mission – to lead these former colonies into full-fledged nationhood. Despite its achievements, many claim that we have fallen short of that goal.
We know that many UWI graduates are facing hitherto unseen levels of underemployment, even in the high-demand professions such as medicine and law. We have accepted the challenge of utilising our resources to help younger generations learn how to survive in the dynamically changing world. In such a world, we believe it is of the utmost importance that our citizens be educated and trained to meet and beat every challenge that nature or humankind throws their way. They must be endowed with the ability to spot and exploit commercial opportunities, while deriving novel, ingenious, and workable solutions to our economic, societal and ecological challenges. In particular, they would be fully prepared for the spectrum of scenarios defined by the best and worst case. This would be a legacy of self-sustainability.
Such a legacy would be an enduring one. It would obliterate the debilitating cultural impact of slavery and indentureship. It would determine the ultimate survival and growth of our region.
To build this legacy, we at The UWI, are actively expanding the current ‘education-for-jobs’ paradigm to one that nurtures creativity and innovation and equips citizens for survival in current and future societies.
But we do have a few hurdles to cross.
HURDLES
The biggest hurdle is culture. We have suffered, in more ways than one, from a “plantation legacy” – one in which colonization has stymied what [Lloyd] Best and [Kari] Levitt referred to as an “internal dynamic” resulting in this instance, in an inadequate innovation culture buoyed by an inappropriate education system. This was compounded by what experts call the Dutch Disease, which has resulted from an economy that has historically been too dependent on oil and gas.
In developed nations, whether through serendipity or design, there is a system that ensures that, in the specific case of product or process innovation, for example, new concepts motivated by cutting-edge research are developed and nurtured to the stage of commercialisation. The inherent process connects research through product and process creation; product and process development; and design of production and service support systems through to market deployment. New knowledge is created along the way. Some of the resulting profits are reinvested to complete the cycle of knowledge-creation and commercialisation. In the US this accounts for 4% of GDP.
In developing nations, a gap exists in this wealth-generation model. Product and process creation and development are non-existent or minimal. Knowledge output at the key research centres, typically universities paid for from the national coffers, freely enter the public domain via academic journals, thus contributing to the global store of knowledge. This feeds the wealth generation engines of more developed countries. Production systems and products for commerce and the associated knowledge (IP) are predominantly procured outside the nation.
Despite our past economic success, the gap defines us as a developing country. It makes us vulnerable to world economic upheavals; it robs us of much needed foreign exchange, deprives us of job opportunities for our citizens and, as it represents poor economic sustainability, places us on a path whose end point is not too far from the worst case scenario described earlier.
This brings us back to the definition of the Innovation Imperative. I suggest that what is needed now more than ever is a properly coordinated and financed National Innovation System, ideally comprised of four elements:
- Centres of Excellence designed to exploit a few strategically selected technologies and create knowledge advantages;
- Business development facilities (not funded on a project-by-project basis), e.g. Dubai’s centre for alternative energy; SMEs; entrepreneurs in clusters who can exploit the opportunities created by the Centres or provide D&R ideas to the Centres;
- A financing system that provides physical and human resources; D&R grants; seed money; Venture Capital and encourages Corporate Venturing; and
- A local Test and Adopted Market that can be used in feedback and feedforward modes to inform the SMEs and Centres.
THE TRIPLE HELIX
Such an NIS and the processes associated with the NIS would be the output from meaningful collaboration among academia, industry and government – the Triple Helix – and could serve as a fillip for economic growth in the country.
The partners in the Triple Helix have different yet complementary roles:
- Government would be expected to provide RDI Funding, incentive programmes, a national environment that targets a minimum quality of life that includes, inter alia, significantly lower levels of crime, a better aligned education system and an effective health care system. It should also facilitate ease of conducting business.
- Industry could provide funding for projects of interest, support for project-focused interns, capital for start-ups and process improvement, as well as market, manufacturing and distribution expertise.
- Academia would provide entrepreneurs (primarily students and graduates), new technology, technical assistance, education and training, human capital and partnerships.
The core function of the NIS would be to pull all of this together by providing a framework for coordinating legal, financing, learning institutions, existing and start-up enterprises, marketing to purposefully leverage knowledge in building the innovation spectrum with export entrepreneurship as priority target. The NIS Coordinating Agency (NISCA) must first target the prioritizing of focal areas for R&D investment (foresighting).
Needless to say all of the above has to be predicated on a re-engineered education system delinked from the colonial past and more appropriate to the socio-economic realities facing our country and the region.
UWI’S INNOVATION IMPERATIVE
I would like to summarise how UWI plans to contribute to the national response to the Innovation Imperative. Many of you may know that for some 25 years or so I have been singing the song of innovation-led entrepreneurship; I know first-hand the depth of the challenge in trying to create a supportive university culture. It is particularly difficult when people who are solidly embedded in an existing paradigm, are required to make significant change. That is the challenge facing not just the Campus but the country as well.
That being said, my strategy for this Campus has several components:
- The UWI will work really hard for an early win. As such, last year I mandated the St. Augustine Campus to launch its first spin-off company by August 2017.
- Establish an innovation-to-entrepreneurship ecosystem to provide all the support required to move an idea into impactful – and commercial – reality. That ecosystem will include legal, financial, and business development support, all in collaboration with private and public sectors.
- Target students as a priority, while working with staff, to identify potentially innovative opportunities among the vast array of projects on this Campus. Very conservatively, we would like to spin-off one new company every two years. We would like to see much, much more.
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