Geisha Kow­lessar

In light of T&T's cur­rent state of econ­o­my, stud­ies in in­no­va­tion and an­i­ma­tion are need­ed to guide Gov­ern­ment in re­al­is­ing its ef­forts to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my.

So said Ashram De­o­raj, di­rec­tor– Teach­ers Su­per­vi­sion and Man­age­ment, Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, who de­liv­ered re­marks on be­half of the Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Lovell Fran­cis, at the launch of the Sec­toral In­no­va­tion Map­ping (SIM) of the An­i­ma­tion In­dus­try in T&T held at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre in Port-of-Spain last Fri­day.

"As you would know, the cur­rent volatil­i­ty in the price of oil and gas sug­gests that it is not pru­dent to put all eggs in one bas­ket.

"We need to ex­pand the eco­nom­ic base for our coun­try's sur­vival, and in light of this, I think the con­duct of this re­search and the se­lec­tion of non-en­er­gy in­dus­tries like an­i­ma­tion, a strate­gic ser­vices sec­tor, gives us in Gov­ern­ment a com­pre­hen­sive un­der­stand­ing of vi­able eco­nom­ic al­ter­na­tives to gen­er­ate in­come and em­ploy­ment," De­o­raj said.

Con­grat­u­lat­ing the Na­tion­al In­sti­tute for High­er Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy (Ni­herst) for paving the way to un­der­take a re­search ex­er­cise of this na­ture, De­o­raj said this type of re­search us­ing SIM as the re­search in­stru­ment was not new to the world, but rather new to the con­duct of re­search in T&T. De­scrib­ing an­i­ma­tion as a US bil­lion dol­lar in­dus­try, he said it was al­so one of the fastest grow­ing in­dus­tries glob­al­ly.

He said, "Tra­di­tion­al­ly, the in­dus­try is placed un­der the cre­ative in­dus­tries um­brel­la. In this SIM study how­ev­er, an­i­ma­tion is iden­ti­fied as a strate­gic in­dus­try of the ICT sec­tor.

"This, too, makes per­fect sense. ICT, yes, is an en­abler, but for an­i­ma­tion, this par­tic­u­lar in­dus­try, ICT I be­lieve is most def­i­nite­ly the key dri­ver in every as­pect of this in­dus­try's growth and de­vel­op­ment," De­o­daj added.

He said such an in­dus­try was tru­ly ide­al for un­leash­ing the cre­ative ge­nius of T&T's peo­ple as it pro­vid­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty to show­case tal­ents and Caribbean cul­ture.

"I think the an­i­ma­tion in­dus­try has an op­por­tu­ni­ty to pro­mote a brand or a style that is unique to Trin­bag­on­ian cul­ture and, more gen­er­al­ly, Caribbean cul­ture.

"I am sure the au­di­ence here will agree with me that an­i­ma­tion pro­vides a plat­form to cre­ate a Caribbean iden­ti­ty where sto­ry­lines and char­ac­ters would re­flect the at­ti­tudes, the val­ues and the ideas of our Caribbean peo­ple," De­o­raj said.

Ni­herst's pres­i­dent, Sylvia Lal­la, who al­so spoke, said the in­sti­tute was in its 32nd year of ex­is­tence.

"In the ab­sence of a board of gov­er­nors it is in­cum­bent on my man­age­ment team un­der my lead­er­ship to forge ahead with the busi­ness of Ni­herst.

"Cur­rent­ly, a top pri­or­i­ty is to un­der­take a re­view of our pro­grammes and projects en­sur­ing that all are aligned to the na­tion­al agen­da and, more­over, to our man­date as out­lined in the orig­i­nal Ni­herst Act of 1980," Lal­la said.

About SIM

Sec­toral In­no­va­tion Map­ping, com­mon­ly known as SIM, is not a new re­search tool. In­ter­na­tion­al­ly, SIMs have been used in de­vel­oped and de­vel­op­ing coun­tries not on­ly to un­cov­er the chal­lenges to in­no­va­tion but al­so to high­light the in­ten­si­ty and types of in­ter­ac­tions link­ing the ac­tors in the spe­cif­ic in­dus­try un­der re­view. A SIM study is based on the premise that strength­en­ing the role and link­ages among ac­tors will pos­i­tive­ly in­flu­ence the per­for­mance and com­pet­i­tive­ness of in­no­v­a­tive firms.

The re­search ap­proach for the SIM is in­clu­sive, in­volv­ing ex­ten­sive con­sul­ta­tion with a sig­nif­i­cant sam­ple of stake­hold­ers in in­dus­try. Specif­i­cal­ly for the An­i­ma­tion SIM, the meth­ods de­ployed for col­lect­ing da­ta in­clude both pre­lim­i­nary and pri­ma­ry re­search, par­tic­u­lar­ly a re­view of the avail­able and ac­ces­si­ble lit­er­a­ture on the sec­tor, the con­duct of one-on-one in­ter­views with pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors stake­hold­ers, as well as, acad­e­mia, dis­cus­sions via tele­phone, the ex­change of elec­tron­ic cor­re­spon­dence and net­work­ing at an­i­ma­tion in­dus­try events.

The find­ings of these mi­cro-lev­el stud­ies add to the na­tion­al re­search re­source pool.

The re­sults help to in­form and sup­port ev­i­dence-based de­ci­sion mak­ing.