Early this year, economist Mary King uploaded a blog post headlined Disruptive Outliers, in which she argued, in concurrence with Mona-based UWI professor of Caribbean sustainable development Anthony Clayton, "that incremental innovation (eg improving a drilling machine or making another mobile phone application) is highly doubtful as a route to diversification; we need to engage in disruptive innovation."
Ms King argued that T&T needs to "engage our bright youngsters in the production of breakthrough products and services, much like what we see that came from Bill Joy and Bill Gates (in computer programming), Steve Jobs of Apple and Eric Schmidt of Novell."
She further argued: "These disruptive outliers-to-be, started off as being bright, as many others, but by good fortune and the help of others, love for the emerging technologies, on which they spent a stupendous number of hours training, prepared them for the disruptive innovations that created Apple, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems."
She opined, as well: "If we are really to diversify our economy, we need to create these disruptive outliers and to do so we have to mimic innovation in the US; select the bright ones and the promising technologies (chosen by a foresighting exercise), provide the learning opportunities and the resources in what I call our centres of excellence."