On May 25, 1961, President John F Kennedy of the United States addressed a joint session of Congress and challenged his government and the US industrial sector to put a man on the moon.
This was a cryptic and clearly defined mission statement.
However, the vision behind this was immense. At the time the USSR was leading the US in the space race and was making rapid progress in the development of large rocket engines. What the president intended, his vision, was for the US to transform its economy into one that was foremost technologically innovative, since going to the moon presented broad ranging yet unsolved problems.
Further, the new inventions would have a major impact on the way the world would do business, new products and services in the future.
Listen to the president at Rice University:
"The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new technologies of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, for medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions like Rice will reap the harvest of these gains."
But of major importance was that instead of creating an invention, its patent, then its application to business opportunities, the president was calling on businesses and their clusters to start with an outcome in mind in relation to putting a man on the moon, then do the research and development and the patenting and the innovation to bring it about. The president sought as the vision for the country, to develop an economy based on experimentation. In revitalising the current US economy, President Barack Obama has the same challenge to revamp the experimental economy.
In the run up to the last general election, both the PNM and the PP put their respective visions for the people before us, maybe in keeping with the above biblical quotation. The vision of the PNM is articulated in its vision 2020 covering equal opportunity, high quality of life, health care and education with the rule of law and optimum use of resources. The PNM assured us that under the five pillars of innovation, nurturing a caring society, competitive business and investment, promoting effective government, the ministries and state agencies were mandated to develop policies and programmes to achieve this "vision" of a developed country status before the year 2020. Progress to this state was to be measured by vision 2020 status reports and operational plans prepared and developed every three to four years.
The vision of the PP now is prosperity through creativity, innovation and collaboration, with a mission of economic exclusiveness, participation and equity in an innovation economy for all in T&T. As the PNM these are to be based on pillars, seven of them; people development, poverty eradication and social justice, security, information and communication technologies, a knowledge-based economy, good governance and foreign policy. The PP has just laid in the Senate its National Performance Framework which, like the PNM, is the instrument for measuring progress and to deliver status reports.
The PNM and the PP vision/mission statements were extremely broad with socio-economic initiatives, some of which had well known solutions and others vaguely defined. The US president's approach on the other hand was classic; a systemic combination of a long-term perspective, national participation and effective strategic management focused on an all encompassing output, which via R&D and innovation could provide the new tools that would benefit the society, the economy and boost the competitiveness of the country.
The PNM and the PP completely missed making the national economic call to arms required in a vision/mission statement.
Mary King
via e-mail
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