D An­tho­ny Black­man

"In­no­va­tion is see­ing what every­one has seen and think­ing what no one has thought." –source un­known

Pre­vi­ous­ly, in the steel­pan fra­ter­ni­ty, the mat­ter of Sharpe vs Arnold was set­tled out of court, based on the sur­prise 'enough is enough' state­ment the pan elec­torate has made. Af­ter years of pre­dictable re­sults, pan peo­ple have opt­ed for change in the lead­er­ship and di­rec­tion, with a new at­ti­tude and a big busi­ness ap­proach to pan. The new ex­ec­u­tive head, and chief agent of change, must be con­grat­u­lat­ed for his vic­to­ry at the polls, and his up­ward mo­bil­i­ty, from the roots to the high­est ech­e­lon of steel band ad­min­is­tra­tion. In true gov­ern­ing body style how­ev­er, he has al­ready dis­tanced him­self from the trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty for the or­gan­i­sa­tion's failed mega projects, say­ing he was not high up on the pan food chain in those times. Nonethe­less, most re­searchers of the steel­pan busi­ness have agreed that the fu­ture is still very bright, and if prop­er­ly man­aged and mar­ket­ed, pan can be­come an ex­treme­ly po­tent bil­lion dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion.

Much more re­cent­ly, the pres­i­dent of the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce, in a news­pa­per ar­ti­cle ti­tled "Cham­ber boss: Time for pan to take shape," claims: "the coun­try's fail­ure to con­vert re­search in­to in­no­va­tion where steel­pan is con­cerned is the rea­son why T&T is lag­ging in the de­vel­op­ment of pan... there is a big gap be­tween this re­search and the in­no­va­tion which dri­ves the large scale com­mer­cial pro­duc­tive en­ter­prise... we are in­ven­tors yet we do not own or con­trol this in­ge­nious in­ven­tion world­wide." And fur­ther to this, she re­it­er­ates that our all new G and PHI pans are de­riv­a­tives of the steel­pan, and are smack in the mid­dle of this gap, which needs to be closed. She ad­vis­es that this clo­sure will con­se­quent­ly open the flood­gates of glob­al com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion, mas­sive op­por­tu­ni­ties and wealth gen­er­a­tion. Len "Boogsie" Sharpe, in his rant, summed up this world-class busi­ness de­vel­op­ment sce­nario as, "step­ping down and al­low­ing some­body wid busi­ness in dey blood to take over." This there­fore begs the ques­tion, is the new world gov­ern­ing body ad­min­is­tra­tion ca­pa­ble of achiev­ing this lev­el of big busi­ness?

The Cham­ber boss' con­cern, that: "we are in­ven­tors yet we do not own or con­trol this in­ge­nious in­ven­tion world­wide," is an­oth­er crit­i­cal de­vel­op­ment is­sue. The ju­ry is prob­a­bly still out on the pa­ten­cy and own­er­ship of the steel­pan–the 55 gal­lon drum mod­el; how­ev­er, in an­oth­er news­pa­per ar­ti­cle ti­tled, "G-Pan test­ing be­gins," it was de­clared that the G-Pan has re­ceived its "pend­ing reg­is­tra­tion" sta­tus from the US Patent and Trade­mark Of­fice, for what she iden­ti­fied ear­li­er as, a de­riv­a­tive of the steel­pan. The chair­man of Panadigm In­no­va­tions Ltd, and Dean of the Fac­ul­ty of En­gi­neer­ing of UWI, in this ar­ti­cle made it very clear that these de­riv­a­tives are "nei­ther his, nor his team's new in­ven­tion, but de­vel­op­ment up­on the steel­pan" cre­at­ed by the pi­o­neers and in­ven­tors of the 55-gal­lon drum mod­el. In ad­di­tion, he claims that, "they are the ones with the true rights to own­er­ship of the steel­pan, and that it was un­for­tu­nate that at that time, the coun­try was not ready to ac­cept their ideas, and chal­lenge those ideas in a way where they could have de­rived max­i­mum ben­e­fit."

These view­points un­der­score the ne­ces­si­ty for rights, own­er­ship and con­trol, and spot­light the short­com­ings of the pan body and their de­gree of pas­sion, in the past, for the de­vel­op­ment and just re­ward for this art form. At the of­fi­cial launch of the G-Pan Be­ta Test­ing Pro­gramme, the top seed­ed steel or­ches­tras were pre­sent­ed with the full range of Gen­e­sis Pans, based on points award­ed for their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd po­si­tions to date, at the Na­tion­al Panora­ma fi­nals lev­el. They were al­so of­fered a num­ber of new op­por­tu­ni­ties for their play­ers, arrangers, tuners and in­ven­tors, to come on board the be­ta test­ing project. This project chal­lenges the tal­ents of the steel­pan fra­ter­ni­ty to adopt and em­ploy the cut­ting-edge re­search, sci­ence, tech­nolo­gies and method­olo­gies of both mod­els, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Panadigm In­no­va­tions Ltd.

They now have a great op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­plore and fuse the in­stru­ments in­to their or­ches­tras and mu­si­cal pre­sen­ta­tions. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the tuners and in­ven­tors have ac­cess to blank, pre-as­sem­bled G-Pan drums, to con­duct ex­per­i­ments with, and cre­ate some­thing of their own. The new ad­min­is­tra­tion, mean­while, is faced with this and greater chal­lenges, which seem un­at­tain­able be­cause of their dis­mal track record and dim view, where the de­vel­op­ment of pan is con­cerned. Rais­ing the bar for them will be a her­culean task, un­less in­ter­nal­ly, they can put to­geth­er a team with the ex­per­tise and ex­pe­ri­ence nec­es­sary, to man­age and mar­ket the pan prod­uct glob­al­ly, and/or the vi­sion to in­cor­po­rate ex­ter­nal con­sul­tants, build­ing strate­gic al­liances with these in­di­vid­u­als and high pow­ered or­gan­i­sa­tions such as the Cham­ber and Panadigm, in the way for­ward