To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Giv­en a colo­nial his­to­ry that stretched for more than 450 years and a post-In­de­pen­dence pe­ri­od that has been dom­i­nat­ed by en­er­gy re­sources, it would be cor­rect to say that in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship do not form part of the nat­ur­al DNA of this coun­try. The colo­nial his­to­ry means that coun­tries like T&T were locked in­to the pro­duc­tion of one or two crops whose cul­ti­va­tion de­pend­ed on min­imis­ing or elim­i­nat­ing the cost of labour. For most of its ex­is­tence, there would not have been too much in­no­va­tion or en­tre­pre­neur­ship on a sug­ar plan­ta­tion in Ca­roni dom­i­nat­ed by slaves with a few over­seers and own­ers. In fact, the plan­ta­tion sys­tem, in all of its many man­i­fes­ta­tions, ac­tive­ly dis­cour­aged in­no­va­tion and, lat­ter­ly, en­tre­pre­neur­ship be­came as­so­ci­at­ed with buy­ing for­eign goods as cheap­ly as pos­si­ble and sell­ing those goods on the lo­cal mar­ket.

While there has been some in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship in the post-colo­nial pe­ri­od, the boom and bust na­ture of this econ­o­my, which has been dri­ven by the world mar­ket forces and the de­mand for our nat­ur­al re­sources, has not been con­ducive to ei­ther in­no­va­tion or en­tre­pre­neur­ship. In the past 50 years, there have been pe­ri­ods when T&T has sur­vived and some pe­ri­ods when the econ­o­my has thrived even though there has not been a na­tion­al fo­cus on in­no­va­tion or en­tre­pre­neur­ship. The days of bas­ing the econ­o­my on de­vis­ing the ap­pro­pri­ate tax regime and sim­ply wait­ing for the price of oil or nat­ur­al gas (or sug­ar or co­coa) to go up are over–nev­er to re­turn. In what­ev­er di­rec­tion the lo­cal econ­o­my heads in the fu­ture, it is clear that if we are go­ing to be suc­cess­ful in the fu­ture, in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship will need to be­come em­bed­ded deep with­in the cul­ture of the coun­try.

For these rea­sons, we would like to place on record our whole­heart­ed com­men­da­tion to the lead­er­ship of the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness for last week's launch of two new re­search cen­tres–the Cen­tre for En­tre­pre­neur­ship & In­no­va­tion and the Cen­tre for Cor­po­rate Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty–at the in­sti­tu­tion. The re­al chal­lenge that the Cen­tre for En­tre­pre­neur­ship & In­no­va­tion faces is chang­ing a cul­ture that at best ab­ne­gates and at least di­min­ish­es the im­por­tance in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship. This cul­ture is man­i­fest start­ing in our pri­ma­ry schools and go­ing through­out the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem to the uni­ver­si­ties where the em­pha­sis is still too cen­tred on learn­ing by rote rather than crit­i­cal think­ing. The re­wards of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem have tend­ed to go to those who can learn the most in the short­est space of time rather than those who can solve unique prob­lems us­ing new ap­proach­es.

Thank­ful­ly, much of these weak­ness­es in our ed­u­ca­tion have been iden­ti­fied and are be­ing re­moved. An­oth­er big chal­lenge that the Cen­tre for En­tre­pre­neur­ship & In­no­va­tion faces is in chang­ing the at­ti­tudes of the coun­try's pri­vate sec­tor to risk. It is in­ter­est­ing that at the launch of the cen­tre, the ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness Prof Miguel Car­ril­lo pre­sent­ed some re­search on the ex­is­tence of cer­tain key words in the an­nu­al re­ports of some lo­cal com­pa­nies in the last two years. Prof Car­ril­lo found that the word "risk" was men­tioned 1,109 times while the words "ex­per­i­men­ta­tion" and "ex­plo­ration" were not men­tioned at all. That says a great deal about the at­ti­tude of many lo­cal com­pa­nies to risk-avoid­ance rather than risk cal­cu­la­tion and mit­i­ga­tion. For the econ­o­my to be suc­cess­ful in the fu­ture, the pri­vate sec­tor will need to em­brace in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship even as the Gov­ern­ment re­verts to its stat­ed role of be­ing the fa­cil­i­ta­tor of na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment rather than the lead play­er.