Sascha Wil­son

Plipde­co's chair­man, Dr Rolph Bal­go­b­in, says for the coun­try to be­come an in­no­va­tion dri­ven econ­o­my we must de­vel­op a stronger en­tre­pre­neur­ship cul­ture among the pop­u­la­tion. He was speak­ing on how the 2010 na­tion­al bud­get dealt with com­pet­i­tive­ness at a post bud­get dis­cus­sion host­ed by Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege Past Stu­dents As­so­ci­a­tion at the school's au­di­to­ri­um in San Fer­nan­do on Thurs­day night.

Bal­go­b­in is of the view that this bud­get's fo­cus is more on so­cial sta­bil­i­ty in a time of eco­nom­ic cri­sis, rather than im­prov­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness. He said for the past five years they have been com­par­ing the coun­try's com­pet­i­tive­ness to oth­er coun­tries and this year T&T ranked 86 out of 133 coun­tries. But, he said an in­no­va­tion dri­ven econ­o­my re­quires raw in­no­v­a­tive ca­pac­i­ty from its pop­u­la­tion.

"You know that an econ­o­my is in­no­va­tion dri­ven when you have some kind of busi­ness so­phis­ti­ca­tion and the ca­pac­i­ty for in­no­va­tion. We have some el­e­ments of that, but sev­er­al el­e­ments are still miss­ing."

Not­ing that there were many things that need to be put in place that a bud­get speech might not make ex­plic­it men­tion.

"Some of our com­pet­i­tive dis­ad­van­tage will show up in the re­search, things like favouritism of de­ci­sions of gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials, ef­fec­tive­ness of bank­ing mo­nop­oly pol­i­cy, our na­ture of com­pet­i­tive­ness ad­van­tage and our ca­pac­i­ty for in­no­va­tion."

Bal­go­b­in said it was not enough that peo­ple were grad­u­at­ing from ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions.

"We need more and more peo­ple not to come out of the ter­tiary sys­tem and be em­ploy­ees, not look­ing for the se­cu­ri­ty of a job, but ac­tu­al­ly to take the ideas that they are sup­posed to be gen­er­at­ing through re­search at the uni­ver­si­ties and get­ting in­volved in en­tre­pre­neur­ial en­deav­our. "We need to see new ideas com­ing out of these sys­tems to jus­ti­fy the amount of mon­ey we are putting in­to them. There are still far too many or­gan­i­sa­tions on the is­land that are pay­ing for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and not for per­for­mance and around our uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem we are see­ing a pro­lif­er­a­tion of ac­com­mo­da­tion and roti shops and bars. We aren't see­ing busi­ness. We aren't see­ing off shoots of mod­ern think­ing and in­no­va­tion and peo­ple feel­ing that they need to lo­cate their busi­ness close the uni­ver­si­ty so they can get a hold of some of that."

He said that this means that the coun­try is not where it sup­posed to be in terms of re­search, in terms of build­ing the kind of in­no­v­a­tive ca­pac­i­ty need­ed to re­al­ly main­tain the po­si­tion that the oil and gas rev­enue has put the coun­try in the last few years. "I sus­pect that what we are see­ing in the bud­get is not so much a bud­get in­tend­ed to ad­vance our com­pet­i­tive­ness as it is to hold on to some mea­sure of so­cial sta­bil­i­ty and try and find some way to give us a soft land­ing."