Rapheal John-Lall

The new Mi­crosoft In­no­va­tion Cen­tre (MIC) which opens on Mon­day will pro­vide train­ing for fu­ture busi­ness own­ers, said Frances Cor­reia, coun­try head for the tech gi­ant in T&T.

"The ul­ti­mate goal is to get a lot more busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty from this pro­gramme. These will be new start ups, or it will en­hance al­ready ex­ist­ing busi­ness­es. If you get 1,000 stu­dents pass­ing through the train­ing fa­cil­i­ty in a year, and out of that a 100 in­to pro­to­typ­ing, then 40 take these ideas in­to busi­ness in­cu­ba­tion, those are 40 new busi­ness­es that nev­er had an op­por­tu­ni­ty be­fore.

"We will be go­ing to dif­fer­ent busi­ness cham­bers, SME's and oth­er bod­ies to dri­ve this idea," she told the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day.The MIC at Freeport, the first in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, will pro­vide re­sources and sup­port for stu­dents, en­tre­pre­neurs and star­tups, ac­cel­er­at­ing cre­ation of new com­pa­nies, jobs and growth of the lo­cal soft­ware ecosys­tem.

In May, a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing was signed with the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (Cariri) for col­lab­o­ra­tion on the fa­cil­i­ty. Cariri said on its web­site that the In­no­va­tion Cen­tre will as­sist de­vel­op­ers, in­de­pen­dent soft­ware ven­dors, en­tre­pre­neurs, re­searchers and stu­dents to de­vel­op and de­ploy in­no­v­a­tive soft­ware so­lu­tions based on Mi­crosoft tech­nol­o­gy.

Ser­vices pro­vid­ed at the MIC are de­signed to boost ICT tech­nol­o­gy de­vel­op­ment and fos­ter growth of sus­tain­able lo­cal soft­ware economies through skills and pro­fes­sion­al train­ing, in­dus­try part­ner­ships and in­no­va­tion. It ac­com­mo­dates stake­hold­ers such as aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tions, in­dus­try and gov­ern­ment.

Cor­reia said the MIC will serve as train­ing fa­cil­i­ty pro­vid­ing first world re­search ma­te­r­i­al in a train­ing en­vi­ron­ment, then mov­ing on to the busi­ness in­cu­ba­tor stage where ideas and prod­ucts will be pre­pared for mar­ket.

"We will be train­ing on app de­vel­op­ment, ro­bot­ics, an­i­ma­tion and train­ing on high­er lev­els. We do not want this to be aca­d­e­m­ic but we want peo­ple to use their train­ing for re­al world prob­lems. We have some­one from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) who is us­ing Mi­crosoft Con­nect tech­nol­o­gy to bring­ing hear­ing im­paired per­sons in­to so­ci­ety, to make them more in­te­grat­ed in­to T&T's par­lance. It is us­ing mo­tion tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate sign lan­guage of our own lo­cal di­alect," she said.

Cor­reia said the train­ing will be open to every­one and tu­ition is free.

"Any­one who wants that deep vest­ed train­ing, whether they are reg­is­tered with a train­ing in­sti­tute or not, we want them. Any­one who has an idea that IT tech­nol­o­gy can solve, we want those ideas in the ideas think tank and we will bring the de­vel­op­ers to­geth­er to cre­ate the so­lu­tions and pro­to­type them," she said.Af­ter the train­ing, Cariri, lo­cat­ed on the same com­pound in Freeport, will pro­vide the busi­ness in­cu­ba­tor as­pect.

"Cariri has cre­at­ed the Cen­tre for En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment in Freeport which is a busi­ness in­cu­ba­tor pro­gramme, so we are tak­ing peo­ple from a learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment, then tak­ing them to pro­to­typ­ing and then mov­ing them in­to busi­ness in­cu­ba­tion," Cor­reia said.