Kwame Joseph

More ICT (in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy) en­tre­pre­neurs are need­ed in the Caribbean, ac­cord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Tim Un­win, sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Com­mon­wealth Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CTO).

Un­win spoke with the Sun­day BG while he was in T&T for the "ICTs 4 Skills De­vel­op­ment and En­tre­pre­neur­ship among Young Peo­ple" sym­po­sium which was held be­tween Au­gust 19 and Au­gust 20. The sym­po­sium was host­ed by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty (TATT) in part­ner­ship with the Com­mon­wealth Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CTO), as well as, the Omar Den­go Foun­da­tion from Cos­ta Ri­ca.

Un­win, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at Roy­al Hol­loway Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, said every­one–both young and old–needs to be learn­ing how to use ICTs to achieve their goals in busi­ness and every­day life, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the ac­cel­er­at­ed use of tech­nol­o­gy in mod­ern times.But de­vel­op­ing the skills and de­sire nec­es­sary to fu­el en­tre­pre­neur­ship in the sec­tor or be­com­ing an en­tre­pre­neur, in gen­er­al, starts from the time one is born to adult­hood in Un­win's as­sess­ment.

An ex­pert in skills de­vel­op­ment and en­tre­pre­neur­ship, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the ICT sec­tor, the British pro­fes­sor said: "I think every­thing that one does when one is a child is so in­flu­en­tial."And, even though some peo­ple have the nat­ur­al ap­ti­tude, Un­win said they can still get bet­ter with train­ing.

En­tre­pre­neur­ship's not for every­one

Un­win is of the view that en­tre­pre­neur­ship is not for every­one."I cau­tion against the view that en­tre­pre­neur­ship is go­ing to change the world and there are go­ing to be tens of thou­sands of peo­ple with en­tre­pre­neur­ial skills who are go­ing to build the econ­o­my. I don't think that is ac­tu­al­ly ever go­ing to hap­pen. There are peo­ple who are go­ing to do that but there are peo­ple who want to do oth­er things. It de­pends a lit­tle bit on how you de­fine en­tre­pre­neur­ship."

In defin­ing what an en­tre­pre­neur is, Un­win said he looked at three things. An en­tre­pre­neur is some­one who comes up with new ideas to de­vel­op a busi­ness. He said they al­so had to have a cer­tain set of skills that make them open to de­vel­op­ing an op­por­tu­ni­ty for oth­er peo­ple.Cre­ativ­i­ty, he said, is the third el­e­ment, since en­tre­pre­neur­ship is about do­ing some­thing that has not been done be­fore.

"Peo­ple say if some­one opens their own shop they are an en­tre­pre­neur, I'm not sure about that.

"To me, an en­tre­pre­neur is some­one who ac­tu­al­ly has a vi­sion to do some­thing big­ger than that. If some­one says that a per­son set­ting up a small busi­ness to sell sim cards is an en­tre­pre­neur, okay, I ac­cept that some peo­ple see that, but I don't. At the heart of en­tre­pre­neur­ship, for me, is some­one who will de­vel­op their own busi­ness and em­ploy oth­er peo­ple and move for­ward to gen­er­ate growth in the econ­o­my," said Un­win.

ICT in small state economies

Small state economies, like T&T and oth­ers in the re­gion, pose an in­ter­est­ing chal­lenge for ICT en­tre­pre­neurs.

Un­win said even though many Com­mon­wealth mem­bers were small is­land states, one of the great things about tech­nol­o­gy is that it can be de­vel­oped any­where in the world and have a world mar­ket.

"From small states like Montser­rat and To­ba­go to larg­er ones like Ja­maica, if there are cre­ative peo­ple there is the po­ten­tial to serve a world mar­ket," Un­win said. How­ev­er, he al­so said that de­vel­op­ing prod­uct specif­i­cal­ly de­signed for the lo­cal con­text.

"It's tough and it's tough to make mon­ey. You've got the T&T mar­ket, you've got the Caribbean, you've got North Amer­i­ca, you've got the Com­mon­wealth, it's all very nest­ed but there will al­ways be a de­mand for lo­cal con­tent. Yes, the lo­cal mar­ket is small but if you're not do­ing things for your lo­cal cul­ture, your lo­cal econ­o­my, your lo­cal so­ci­ety, why don't you go live else­where," said Un­win.

A true en­tre­pre­neur

Nico­las Mal­oney, one of the di­rec­tors and co-founders of F1rst Me­dia Ltd–a lo­cal com­pa­ny that pro­vides ICT so­lu­tions–agreed that fo­cus should be placed on the lo­cal mar­ket.Mal­oney said: "Our fo­cus is Trinidad, Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica but the perks are glob­al. It works the same in any coun­try. I trav­el to New York, to France, to Turkey and I use the app while I'm there. I go in­to places in those coun­tries and add them and so forth."

The app Mal­oney re­ferred is one which "is ba­si­cal­ly a way for busi­ness­es to ac­cess con­sumers in a way that they haven't been able to do in the past."He ex­plained to the Sun­day BG that if, for ex­am­ple, some­one was look­ing for a place to pur­chase food at night or on a day like Sun­day, where some places may be closed or at a venue where there may be no card pay­ment sys­tem, Mal­oney said the F1rst Me­dia app can be used to search for food and lo­cate such places.

The app al­so al­lows a user to see all places that are near­by, see which restau­rants are the most pop­u­lar, see if friends vis­it­ed there be­fore, see their rec­om­men­da­tions, take a look at what is on the menu and then to make a de­ci­sion.

De­scrib­ing an­oth­er sce­nario where lo­cal tech so­lu­tions are need­ed, he said: "How would you know where you can get the lat­est Beats by Dre head­phones lo­cal­ly, at a good price? You're not too sure, you would have to go from store to store. You would quick­er go to Ama­zon and buy in­ter­na­tion­al­ly."

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that the Caribbean mar­ket is small, Mal­oney said T&T and oth­er coun­tries in the re­gion have room for ICT so­lu­tions like those his com­pa­ny of­fers as the re­gion­al sec­tor is not very com­pet­i­tive and busi­ness­es with­in the re­gion are ready for them.He told the Sun­day BG that busi­ness­es in T&T have been "tremen­dous­ly" ac­cept­ing of the con­cept and they have recog­nised the grow­ing use of dig­i­tal de­vices by con­sumers and the need for dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

"The prob­lem is, most of the lo­cal busi­ness­es aren't on­line," said Mal­oney.Even though lo­cal busi­ness­es may be be­hind their in­ter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts from de­vel­oped coun­tries, "they know how to use tech­nol­o­gy so the op­por­tu­ni­ty is there," Mal­oney said.Some of the lo­cal busi­ness the ICT en­tre­pre­neur said his com­pa­ny is work­ing with in­clude: Dig­i­cel, Courts, Lucky Dol­lar, Op­tometrist To­day, Hy­att and Massy Au­to­mo­tive.

Reach­ing to the point where the en­tre­pre­neur and his busi­ness part­ners could ap­proach com­pa­nies of this stature took a lot of hard work."With any­thing that is worth achiev­ing it was pret­ty dif­fi­cult, but that comes with the ter­ri­to­ry of just try­ing to do any­thing big or rev­o­lu­tion­ary. First you need to find a con­cept that you can start with­out need­ing a huge cap­i­tal in­vest­ment. The in­no­va­tion comes in the ac­tu­al busi­ness mod­el.

"But it's tough, it's not easy at all," he said.

Fund­ing a start-up

The founders of the com­pa­ny and their fam­i­lies fund­ed the ini­tial start-up cost of F1rst Me­dia's par­ent com­pa­ny Novustech Ltd–a com­pa­ny that deals with en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy in the Caribbean. This, in turn, pro­vid­ed the cap­i­tal to start F1rst.Pro­fes­sor Un­win sees this as the true en­tre­pre­neur­ial ap­proach."If I take the log­ic of what I see an en­tre­pre­neur to be, en­tre­pre­neurs would fund their star­tups them­selves," he said. He al­so added there are a num­ber of glob­al ini­tia­tives "to try and crack that nut."

One of the ini­tia­tives Un­win point­ed to is the in­no­va­tion hub. He said that many in­no­va­tion hubs fo­cus on giv­ing peo­ple tech­no­log­i­cal skills but he thinks it is re­al­ly im­por­tant for them to do more."It's giv­ing them busi­ness skills, fi­nan­cial skills, etc," he said.

That is not his on­ly is­sue with in­no­va­tion hubs.

He said: "In some coun­tries there are busi­ness start-up funds that gov­ern­ments and pri­vate sec­tor make avail­able. Some of the big glob­al cor­po­ra­tions are fund­ing in­no­va­tion hubs and en­tre­pre­neur­ial ini­tia­tives. I have some prob­lems with that be­cause what tends to hap­pen is you get a big glob­al cor­po­ra­tion putting fund­ing in and they then iden­ti­fy the bright peo­ple that work in those in­no­va­tion hubs and take them in­to their com­pa­nies which very of­ten clamps down on their en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it. Ide­al­ly, go­ing back to my de­f­i­n­i­tion, these peo­ple should be trained to go out and build their own busi­ness­es."

And there is vast po­ten­tial in the Caribbean to do just that, ac­cord­ing to Mal­oney."The thing about the ICT sec­tor is that, when you hear about things like Face­book and Twit­ter, those things start­ed with one or two peo­ple, there's very low ini­tial costs but the long-term po­ten­tial is im­mense. It's all based on hu­man cap­i­tal and in­tel­lect, so there isn't much dif­fer­ence be­tween a soft­ware de­vel­op­er here and a de­vel­op­er in the US.

"If the Caribbean can max­imise the in­tel­lec­tu­al strength of its peo­ple, we can def­i­nite­ly go in­to the ICT sec­tor and lever­age it to do great things," Mal­oney said