6
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 9 JULY, 2017
INNOVATION CONFERENCE –
June 27 & 28, 2017
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 wouldmove 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.
Professor Brian
Copeland: The St.
Augustine Campus
has been mandated to
launch its first spin-off
company in 2017.
The
Innovation
IMPERATIVE
This is an abridged version of the address given by
Professor Brian Copeland
, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal,
The UWI St. Augustine Campus, at the opening of the
Innovation Conference
held at the Teaching and Learning Centre.
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 GermanMittlestand in which 500 1B Euro
companies, 4,000middle-performance companies and over
10million SMEs each account for roughly a third of German
foreign exports.
I propose that the Forex stratification of theMittlestand
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.
1. 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.
2. In the face of natural disasters our citizens can survive as
individuals or small groups and can build andmaintain
resilient communities that can grow to re-establish
societies.
3. We understand and respect the ecology and are
effectively resourceful in protecting it.
4. The economy would be buoyed by a robust Mittlestand-
like structure, made so by an extremely healthy network
of innovation-driven, export-oriented SMEs
5. 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
