Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

The re­cent World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum rank­ings have been some­thing of an eye-open­er for many par­ties giv­en our down­grade, but there's one area which jumped out at me. It's the low score on the abil­i­ty to in­no­vate (105 out of 138 coun­tries).

This is more than a lit­tle strange with all the mon­ey spent on ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion, and the GATE free-for-all which con­tin­ued up till last year. But per­haps the hard times which end­ed the GATE train are not en­tire­ly bad, as the slow­ing of the loud gush of mon­ey al­lows less ob­streper­ous voic­es to be heard. It al­so pro­vides a van­tage to the crit­i­cal mind, which the pushy, ob­nox­ious one can't reach, to look around and see what can be made of what's avail­able.

This trait is the hall­mark of en­tre­pre­neurs and in­no­va­tors. Times of plen­ty make peo­ple and in­sti­tu­tions com­pla­cent and lazy. Hard times can make them sharp­er. The trait of an in­no­va­tor is that he or she nev­er los­es the rest­less, dis­sat­is­fied way of think­ing about and look­ing at the world. There's one ex­am­ple in T&T which is es­pe­cial­ly apt for the mo­ment. And the man of the mo­ment is Prof Patrick Ho­sein, a MIT schol­ar, and pro­fes­sor of com­put­er sci­ence at UWI, St Au­gus­tine.

A lit­tle over a year ago, Prof Ho­sein ob­served that an un­der­grad­u­ate who had re­turned from a NASA schol­ar­ship was be­ing un­der-utilised by the de­part­ment. The pro­fes­sor de­cid­ed to con­duct an ex­per­i­ment. He told the stu­dent he would hire him, and pay his salary to do noth­ing but re­search. The aim was to see if he could pro­duce a pub­lish­able pa­per with­in three months. The stu­dent pro­duced four pa­pers with­in one year, and was se­cured ac­cep­tance to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty for his post-grad­u­ate work.

Thus was born TT­LAB, the re­gion's first pri­vate­ly fund­ed think tank. Prof Ho­sein de­cid­ed that the suc­cess of the ex­per­i­ment de­mand­ed it be con­tin­ued and he sought new fel­lows, as­so­ciates and re­searchers. In just over a year, TT­LAB has at­tract­ed 19 fel­lows and pro­duced 15 pub­li­ca­tions and con­fer­ence pa­pers, which is re­mark­able by any stan­dard for a year's en­deav­our. The top­ics ad­dressed range from op­ti­miz­ing elec­tric­i­ty grids, gaug­ing emo­tion­al re­spons­es from so­cial me­dia ("Sen­ti­ment Clas­si­fi­ca­tion from Twit­ter Feeds"), an app for the de­tec­tion of dan­ger­ous dri­ving, and the ge­net­ics of non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases in the re­gion.

The project is in­no­v­a­tive in many ways, not in the least in its fund­ing. Rather than re­ly­ing on cor­po­rate or gov­ern­ment fund­ing, Prof Ho­sein dis­played the trait that sep­a­rates the en­tre­pre­neurs from the goats: he put his mon­ey where his mouth is. His own com­pa­ny, T&T Net­work In­for­ma­tion Cen­tre (TTNIC), which man­ages the do­main .tt, funds TT­LAB.

Prof Ho­sein is a for­mer na­tion­al schol­ar­ship win­ner, holds five de­grees from MIT, and holds more than 40 patents in cel­lu­lar phone and com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy from a ca­reer with AT&T, Bell Labs, Hua Wei and now UWI. He is al­so qui­et­ly out­spo­ken about the lo­cal man­gling of the term "in­no­va­tion". Trinida­di­ans, he says, from the man in the street, to busi­ness, to gov­ern­ment, and even in the acad­eme, do not know what in­no­va­tion means. "They be­lieve it means im­port­ing tech­nol­o­gy and adapt­ing it. But it's more than that."

The prob­lems go fur­ther than mis-per­cep­tion. Busi­ness is al­ways im­pa­tient to re­cov­er its costs and see quick re­turns on in­vest­ment so its fund­ing re­search tends to de­sire prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion, and not pure re­search from which many ben­e­fits de­rive, but in the long term. Gov­ern­ment pack­ages are fre­quent­ly wrapped in in­ex­tri­ca­ble red-tape. And acad­e­mia is not as de­tached and aloof as you might imag­ine.

In ad­di­tion to all that, there is a sur­pris­ing prob­lem, giv­en the lo­cal chest-beat­ing about "na­tion­al­ism" and lo­cal spunk. "A lot of lo­cal com­pa­nies use Huawei tech­nol­o­gy," said Prof Ho­sein. "I worked at Huawei and have about 15 patents in my name which are in­te­grat­ed in­to their prod­ucts. So my work is be­ing used, but no one will ac­cept my help when I of­fer it lo­cal­ly."

This was the iden­ti­cal com­plaint of the late Prof Dave Chadee, who told sto­ries about be­ing sum­moned to gov­ern­ment meet­ings with for­eign con­sul­tants who had used his work to de­vel­op vec­tor and par­a­site con­trol strate­gies. One sto­ry Chadee rel­ished telling was be­ing in a meet­ing with a (for­mer) gov­ern­ment min­is­ter and for­eign con­sul­tants. The min­is­ter asked the con­sul­tants what could be done about the lo­cal sit­u­a­tion. The lead con­sul­tant said: "Why don't you ask him?" Point­ing to Chadee. "It's his work we're us­ing."

Clear­ly we have a ways to go be­fore we see the emer­gence of a lo­cal Google or Mac. Notwith­stand­ing, it's worth men­tion­ing that Ho­sein is a lau­re­ate of the An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Caribbean Awards, which is the first sub­stan­tial prize for sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy (among oth­er things) of­fered across the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean. It was that award, said Ho­sein, that helped him to cre­ate TT­LAB. (I should dis­close here that I work as a con­sul­tant for the Caribbean Awards.)

But the Awards' con­tri­bu­tion to TT­LAB is es­pe­cial­ly apt, since the ANSA Caribbean Awards were launched a decade ago by An­tho­ny N Sab­ga, an en­tre­pre­neur who ar­rived here in 1930 as an im­mi­grant from a vil­lage in Syr­ia. His own jour­ney from small busi­ness­man to busi­ness mag­nate in­volved many dis­ap­point­ments and con­fronta­tions with is­sues sim­i­lar to those faced by Ho­sein and Chadee.

I guess the fi­nal word on this is if you want to know how to in­no­vate, there are ways to do it. Do not, for ex­am­ple, as Bhoe Tewarie did when he was a min­is­ter in the last gov­ern­ment, sit peo­ple down in the Cen­tral Bank Au­di­to­ri­um and tell them how to be in­no­v­a­tive. Do, how­ev­er, look at in­no­va­tors, and do what they're do­ing, and ac­cept their help when they of­fer it.