The Vice Chancellor of UWI, Sir Hilary Beckles, in his feature address at the annual Dr Eric Williams' Memorial Lecture told us that within the next five years all of the UWI campuses will be outfitted with University operated industrial parks.
So much so that he said that UWI's 2017-2022 strategic plan includes the transformation of the Penal-Debe campus in South Trinidad into a technology park, where Chinese professors would teach software engineering to our students. Further, that in Barbados UWI has already leased a large building and will transform it into a Technology Park; the same will be done in Jamaica by that government using a number of abandoned buildings.
The aim of these research/innovation parks is to drive the issues of economic diversification in order to generate more wealth in the region. One wonders why we need Chinese professors to teach us software engineering when we have a UWI that is accredited in engineering, computer science and information technology.
Further, a decision has been taken to build the Tamana Technology Park in which UTT is/was to be the research institution.
This at best remains a forlorn hope that the requisite industry would locate there, at Tamana, to exploit the inventions of that university, UTT, and use its research facilities. I dare say that the Vice Chancellor is deluding himself if he is thinking that he can repeat, for example, the phenomenon of California's Silicon Valley by simply attaching some real estate to a university whose research culture is the traditional "publish or perish"- research that is normally not directly related to what the region may need to diversify its economies away from the plantation.
But the Vice Chancellor would not be the only one to make this mistake. Prof Terman who created Silicon Valley was employed to repeat this effort in New Jersey, USA; he failed miserably. Even the renowned Prof Michael Porter was also commissioned to create such parks for other locations; he recommended to governments all over the world that, were they to encourage concentrations of interconnected companies and specialised suppliers around an existing research university this could jump start the creation of industrial parks; these efforts also failed.
According to Ana Lee Saxenia of the University of California Berkeley, Silicon Valley did not simply concentrate on the collaboration of institutions, but on producing and encouraging very smart people who formed what she called a giant real world social/technological network in which they collaborated, experimented, invented and taught each other.
They changed jobs and with the venture capital available formed companies freely while still supporting a knowledge based professional network with easy information exchange. Therefore, the challenge for UWI in order to build such parks to help diversify the economies of the region is to create such a professional network of smart and passionate people while the institutions simply facilitate and provide the space and other resources for the social/technological networking.
Still, for economic diversification such social/technological networks of our smart people have to be built, but how? The first step for the region is to mount national debates to get buy-in from the various publics on what needs to be done, what resources are required to create the higher risk companies to produce these tradables- a legitimation exercise.
We next have to decide how we create the networks of inventive/innovative and business savvy graduates- what should our innovation systems look like so that we can harness the passion of our bright people to start and grow these start-ups? Then we have to decide on what areas to focus our attention given our relatively small sizes and restricted numbers of skilled people–a foresighting exercise. But, more so, we need visionary leadership and skilled/ experienced advisors.
The intentions of the Vice Chancellor are indeed laudable but he appears to lack the support of such advisors. Diversification is not a task for UWI in isolation; the university is but one player in a Triple Helix together with the governments of the region (financiers of last resort) and the private sector, in particular the new innovative entrepreneurs.
Mary K King
St. Augustine