Lo­cal com­pa­nies need to be­come more in­no­v­a­tive if this coun­try is to in­crease its com­pet­i­tive­ness in­ter­na­tion­al­ly says Khem­raj Nan­hu, chair­man of the Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (BDC). He said busi­ness cul­tures and strate­gies must be changed for the bet­ter in or­der for this coun­try to im­prove its score card on the Glob­al Com­pet­i­tive­ness In­dex (GCI). Nan­hu said the area of in­no­v­a­tive­ness was one in which T&T had "tra­di­tion­al­ly scored poor­ly" ac­cord­ing to the GCI and ques­tioned whether com­pa­nies were will­ing to move be­yond what was the cur­rent best prac­tice, to shap­ing new best prac­tices.

Nan­hu was speak­ing at Mon­day's third Small and Medi­um En­ter­prise (SME) Con­fer­ence with the theme: Strength­en­ing the growth and in­no­v­a­tive ca­pac­i­ty of SMEs in the Caribbean held at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, lo­cat­ed on Dock Road, Port-of- Spain. The As­so­ci­at­ed of Char­tered and Cer­ti­fied Ac­coun­tants (AC­CA) host­ed the con­fer­ence, at which the BDC chair­man won­dered if com­pa­nies had the struc­ture to sew and cul­ti­vate an in­no­v­a­tive cul­ture, much less sup­port in­no­v­a­tive ca­pac­i­ty. Nan­hu ques­tioned whether firms were fo­cused on tech­nol­o­gy strate­gies, idea qual­i­ty, idea gen­er­a­tion, tech­nol­o­gy ac­qui­si­tion and ex­ploita­tion, too, in this quest.

He ad­vanced the po­si­tion that com­pa­nies had to move be­yond what was the cur­rent best prac­tice and in­stead, shape new best prac­tices, if T&T was the shoot up to more pre­mi­um spots on the GCI. The lat­est GCI re­port pub­lished just this week pushed this coun­try three places up from 84th in the world rank­ing. In 2010, the coun­try ranked 138 out of 139 coun­tries. One year, pri­or, T&T was rat­ed 131 out of 133 coun­tries in the world. "We at the BDC asked our­selves, what can we do to im­pact this in­dex? In look­ing at our range of ser­vices, we in­den­ti­fied one prod­uct which was al­ready geared to­wards fi­nanc­ing in­no­va­tion: the re­search and de­vel­op­ment fa­cil­i­ty.

"This is a grant fa­cil­i­ty with the ob­jec­tive of stim­u­lat­ing and sup­port­ing in­vest­ment in new and ad­vanced tech­nol­o­gy, process and in­no­va­tion, as a com­pet­i­tive­ness en­hance­ment tool for busi­ness in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor," said Nan­hu. The BDC found, how­ev­er, that com­pa­nies ac­cess­ing the grant were not at num­bers which the state en­ter­prise had en­vis­aged. The rea­sons were: the grant val­ued at $100,000 pre­clud­ed larg­er com­pa­nies from ac­cess­ing it; and that a lack of agree­ment on what was meant by the term re­search and de­vel­op­ment, as well as no ap­pre­ci­a­tion in the steps in­volved from idea con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion to com­mer­cial ac­tion. Nan­hu said: "In the lat­ter part of 2009, we took steps to ad­dress these two key is­sues. The first was to lob­by the Min­istry of Trade for an in­crease in the R&D grant.

This was achieved and the grant has since been in­creased from a max­i­mum of $100,000 to $500,000 for a sin­gle com­pa­ny project and for a busi­ness al­liance of two or more com­pa­nies, the max­i­mum grant is now $1 mil­lion. Grants are al­so avail­able for patent reg­is­tra­tion up to a max­i­mum of $300,000." The of­fi­cial said the is­sue of an im­ple­men­ta­tion pro­gramme to­wards in­still­ing an in­no­v­a­tive cul­ture in lo­cal busi­ness was an­oth­er is­sue that con­front­ed the com­pa­ny. So the BDC came up with a sys­tem called IN­STIL, a 12 month pro­gramme aimed at de­vel­op­ing a thriv­ing in­no­v­a­tive cul­ture with­in par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies, geared to­wards new prod­ucts, ser­vices and process­es as ev­i­dence of busi­ness growth.

They were:

• An ini­tial In­no­va­tion Au­dit fol­lowed by a se­ries of In­no­va­tion De­vel­op­ment Work­shops;

• A cus­tomised plan of ac­tion and road map to fa­cil­i­tate the gen­er­a­tion and com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of new prod­ucts and or ser­vices and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of new process­es with each or­ga­ni­za­tion;

• Coun­ter­part fund­ing for ini­tia­tives in sup­port of this pro­gramme where pos­si­ble;

• Ten in-house im­ple­men­ta­tion/men­tor­ship ses­sions to sup­port the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the ac­tion plan and road map;

• An as­signed BDC co-or­di­na­tor to as­sist the com­pa­nies with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of their ac­tion plans and;

• Ac­cess to a net­work of ex­perts in the field of in­no­va­tion.

Nan­hu said: "The com­pa­nies ac­cess­ing the fa­cil­i­ty has since in­creased and our first co­hort of the IN­STIL In­no­va­tion pro­gramme grad­u­at­ed two weeks ago. "So as you can see, BDC is do­ing our part to as­sist our medi­um and large com­pa­nies to take their busi­ness to the next lev­el. We are cur­rent­ly eval­u­at­ing the IN­STIL pro­gramme with a view to im­prov­ing it be­fore we in­vite our sec­ond co­hort, lat­er this year."