Suc­cess­ful T&T en­tre­pre­neurs who have made their mark lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly will be in the spot­light when the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce hosts the 4th Caribbean SME Busi­ness Con­fer­ence, In­no­va­tion in busi­ness–The Caribbean Ex­pe­ri­ence, Ju­ly 9 and 10 at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain.Fea­tured speak­ers will be Max­ine Williams, glob­al head of di­ver­si­ty, Face­book; Dr Wayne Fred­er­ick, pres­i­dent Howard Uni­ver­si­ty; Dr Camille Wardrop Al­leyne, as­sis­tant pro­gramme sci­en­tist, In­ter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion at NASA John­son Space Cen­tre; Eti­enne Charles, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of Jazz Trum­pet, Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty and CEO/founder, Cul­ture Shock Mu­sic; Nigel Hen­ry, founder/lead an­a­lyst, So­lu­tion by Sim­u­la­tion; Chris­t­ian Stone, founder/di­rec­tor, More Vi­no, More Sushi; and An­toinette Maund, founder/own­er. Ate Lo­go Shoe Store.Jerome Cham­bers, chair­man of the Cham­ber's No­va Com­mit­tee, said the up­com­ing con­fer­ence is part of a con­tin­u­ing ef­fort to "re­spond to the ex­pressed needs of this im­por­tant sec­tor of the econ­o­my by way of ex­am­ple"."In 2010 it was es­ti­mat­ed that in Trinidad and To­ba­go, SMEs num­bered ap­prox­i­mate­ly 18,000, con­tribut­ing near­ly 28 per cent to GDP and em­ploy­ing 200,000 per­sons–ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 per cent of the labour force." he said.

"The Min­istry of Labour and Small and Mi­cro En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment have in­di­cat­ed that 91 per cent of busi­ness es­tab­lish­ments in T&T are SMEs with 75 per cent be­ing mi­cro en­ter­pris­es."

Speak­ing at the launch of the con­fer­ence at the Cham­ber's West­moor­ing head­quar­ters yes­ter­day, Cham­bers said the aim was to high­light for­eign and lo­cal based T&T na­tion­als who have ex­celled in their re­spec­tive fields so that par­tic­i­pants can learn from their ex­pe­ri­ences.CEO Cather­ine Ku­mar said the Cham­ber has made SME de­vel­op­ment one of its strate­gic ar­eas of fo­cus.

She said: "It has been said in many fo­ra that SME growth and de­vel­op­ment is an im­por­tant pil­lar in the growth and de­vel­op­ment of our na­tion­al econ­o­my. This is ev­i­denced by the fact that, just as with many coun­tries world­wide, SMEs ac­count for thou­sands of com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing in T&T. They em­ploy a sig­nif­i­cant part of our labour force, and con­tribute over 20 per cent of our GDP.

"We must there­fore build struc­tures that sup­port their growth, and I use this op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­new the Cham­ber's call for the re­view and en­act­ment of the fis­cal in­cen­tives for SMEs list­ing on the Stock Ex­change to im­prove ac­cess to cap­i­tal for SMEs."

Ku­mar said too of­ten the ten­den­cy was to look ex­ter­nal­ly for ex­am­ples of suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neurs and in­trapre­neurs, "not re­al­is­ing, or ap­pre­ci­at­ing, that we have our own ex­am­ples of sons and daugh­ters of our soil, who are em­i­nent busi­ness own­ers or lead­ers." The tar­get au­di­ence for the con­fer­ence is own­ers, man­age­ment and key staff of SMEs, as well as stu­dents, peo­ple con­sid­er­ing start­ing a busi­ness, aca­d­e­mics and re­searchers.There will be pre­sen­ta­tions by the var­i­ous speak­er fol­lowed by a short Q&A ses­sion. Par­tic­i­pants will then be di­vid­ed in­to groups of 12 to 15 for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­ter­act more di­rect­ly with pre­sen­ters who will ro­tate to dif­fer­ent groups. This will al­low for a more di­rect in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the pre­sen­ters and par­tic­i­pants.