Martin Henry
IRAE IS coming! IRAE is the Inventors, Researchers and Entrepreneurs Convention and Trade show staged by Northern Caribbean University. The second staging of what the university hopes to be a regular biennial event for "harnessing visions and creativity for economic development", takes place from October 17-19.
I hope the promise of making IRAE 'bigger and better' this year will be kept. I had the pleasure of being a panel participant in the 2003 show and would have gone as a visitor anyway as I plan to do this year. While the concept of bringing inventors, researchers and entrepreneurs together under one roof was good, I found that the 'trade show' of established, routine goods and services dominated the event. And the under one roof arrangement for both displays and presentations created a serious noise problem for presenters and their audiences. We shall see if the organisers have developed innovative solutions for these and other teething problems in the staging of a major creative event which I hope will have a distinguished future.
At the heart of the whole business of research, invention, innovation and entrepreneurship is the business of learning to do things differently and better - and learning from mistakes. The way we educate young Jamaicans - and the IRAE hosts are a major educational institution - is not encouraging of breaking moulds and striking out on new paths. Generally we educate for certitude and continuity - and for 'good' jobs. Every society faces similar obstacles, but the extent to which they can break free and encourage innovation determines their progress.
One of the interesting conversations I stuck up at IRAE 1 was with a Manchester-based engineer who wanted to produce and use cassava as a basic commercial raw material for a variety of products, including chips. I have no idea how far he has got on. Most entrepreneurial ideas die in gestation or soon after birth, but obviously the more that can be nurtured to maturation the better will a society be harnessing its innovative talent for progress. The lack of venture capital support is one of the major problems that innovative entrepreneurs face for start-up.
INDIGENOUS TECHNOLOGY
After Hurricane Ivan devastated the banana industry, Jamaica Producers turned to producing cassava chips. Is that product still on the market? To borrow the language of university students, cassava wuz ere when the Europeans turned up and had its own indigenous technology of production and processing. Years ago we documented a number of 'indigenous technologies' under the UNDP-sponsored project for strengthening national capacity in science and technology, with the idea of innovatively upgrading at least some of them to modern production technologies for economic development.
Two other pieces of work I am doing have taken me back to the major innovation in banana cultivation out of which Jamaica Producers emerged in 1927. Captain Lorenzo Baker's innovative entrepreneurial idea of running Jamaican bananas, then a marginal domestic food crop, out of Port Antonio in fast clipper sailing ships to Boston led to the creation of the banana industry from tropical farms to northern tables. Banana production and distribution is now almost an exact science. When Baker ran his first cargo the banana was a complete novelty in the United States and people had to be taught to eat the fruit and to love it, a fabulous marketing case study.
THREATENING COMFORTABLE ARRANGEMENTS
Transitions in African Caribbean and Pacific/European Union trading relationships under World Trade Organisation pressures are threatening old comfortable arrangements for the sale of sugar and bananas. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Pushed as we are, we who led the world in the creation of the banana industry and were once the largest producers, where next can we take the sugar cane plant, the banana plant and alternatives? What more can we innovatively do in non-agri areas like information and communication technology, tourism, non-metallic minerals, music and entertainment?
Next month the Ministry of Commerce, Science and Tech-nology is to make its first National Innovation Awards. It will be Science Month, the month in which the SRC which was established to drive research and innovation for development has hosted its annual national conference for most of the 18 years that the conference has run. Having been a perpetual participant from conference one, I have often wondered why many of those fine applied research papers can't be worked up into commercially viable innovations.
Research and the innovations which it spawns drive modern economies. And it is not just a matter of more but different and better. UNCTAD, in 1997, conducted a "Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) Review for Jamaica. Having had the privilege of participation on the research team for the Background Report which the U.N. agency used, I would like to think that the current interest in encouraging and rewarding innovation are late fruits of that and similar efforts by many others over many years.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
