Small but significant are the efforts and achievements of inventiveness and innovation abroad in the mind space of T&T.
I confess to not being aware of this strain of enterprise existing here. Well assisted and resourced it can develop into an industry capable of moving forward with the necessary but so far elusive diversification of the economy.
Unaware I was, but not surprised at what has been achieved by the inventors and innovators group, after all this is the society that invented "pan", this is the society from which the early inventors came, to be followed by inventors/innovators such as Ellie Mannette, Anthony Williams, Neville Jules, Ernest Ferreira, Bertie Marshall, Prof Brian Copeland and others.
A conversation with three off-beat looking inventors/innovators–and how else could they be, those who go ahead of the rest of us have never conformed; if they were to then they could not lead–gave me an insight into the efforts at inventing products which could attract the attention of the export market, and the innovators who develop on existing products adding unique and indigenous features to them.
Of great significance, one of the innovators informed that he and his group have fabricated and sold sluice gates to assist with agricultural production to ameliorate flooding of crops, and with a 70 per cent local content in the gates.
The potential capability of the two groups (inventors and innovators) is to one, replace imported products and save valuable foreign exchange, and two, to create new products that could attract consumers in the big, bad export market in which inventors must create products which can compete in innovation, quality and price.
The ultimate question for our society to answer is how are the innovators and inventors to be assisted to do what they do best: contemplate the possibility for products and services to fill and create needs, and to attract enterprise and capital that can perceive of profit possibilities to bring what the mind can conceive of into reality.
The inventors/innovators say the practical assistance needed is to assist with the support infrastructure to create prototypes of what is in the mind.
Secondly, and perhaps of greatest challenge to the innovator/inventor groups will be to persuade local investors, long schooled in the art of becoming agents for the producers of the industrial world, to "take a chance on life" and invest in a "made-in-T&T brand."
Equally challenging is for local consumers, who swear by the foreign brands and deep down believe that we and our creations are inferior to what comes in from "foreign", to rearrange our predispositions and tastes to establish as a first choice, locally produced goods and services.
But local inventors/innovators and their investors cannot expect gifts, they must quickly reach high quality production levels if they are to keep consumers willing to purchase and consume local products and services as an investment in creating jobs and well-being in the society and economy.
This challenge cannot be minimised. The vast and sophisticated industrial and commercial production platforms of today were developed over a few hundred years, we have to create the capacity while competing against the industrial giants of the 21st century.
To make the great leap forward reaches beyond subduing an acquired taste and predisposition for what we import.
It will require throwing off psychological and social ways of being acquired through the socialisation and acculturation of the plantation economy and society. Through that historical process we came to believe that for sophisticated products we have to look abroad as our capability is restricted to producing raw materials for the industrial world.
"The Government's continuous clamour for inventions and entrepreneurs rings a sour note in our ears–for we know that we (the individual inventors) are the ones who have to go to the technicians and convince them that we have an idea for an invention. There are no support systems," assert the Inventors Association of T&T in a 2011 report on what is needed for them to create the products their minds have conceived of. They tell me nothing has changed significantly in the five years since the report was written.
"In the meantime we are stonewalled, discouraged, let down, cast aside, disregarded, not funded, not taken seriously, tried and tested, rejected and plagiarised."
The group also places focus on the education system and the need to apply science to inventiveness and innovation.
But the note is made that inventors are not only bred at the university and higher education levels, if that were so, we would not have had the steel pan, calypso and soca.
Those unique products emerged from the minds of mostly people at the lower educational (even from amongst the "uneducated") social and economic ranks of the society, from the social cast offs; those the magistrates ritually jailed for playing "noisy instruments" to disturb the peace.
The recommendations of IPATT are many: simplify patenting procedures; bring down the cost of inventors getting a prototype out there for investors to see possibilities; have the President of the Republic proclaim to the world that any steelpan without the made in T&T stamp cannot be considered authentic; prosecute intellectual pirates; and have a one-world patent.
I profile the existence of the innovators/inventors to inform that below the din of political grandstanding there are people out there intent on creating and innovating.