As re­port­ed in the Trinidad Guardian, the leader of the UNC at a meet­ing with par­ty mem­bers promised that when the par­ty re­gains the reins of gov­ern­ment it will cre­ate a dig­i­tal in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor. I pre­sume that giv­en our de­plet­ing pe­tro­le­um re­sources it was ap­pre­ci­at­ed that we have to im­port to sur­vive, ie, we have to ex­port to earn the re­quired for­eign ex­change. Fur­ther, we have to be glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive in the lat­ter and this to­day is about the use of in­no­va­tion, in­ven­tion/knowl­edge. Sure­ly it was re­alised that in­no­va­tion/in­ven­tions stem from R&D (re­search and de­vel­op­ment) pro­grammes and these have to be fund­ed.

For ex­am­ple, the US spent on R&D some US$410.2 bil­lion in 2016 and had three mil­lion re­searchers in­volved and Chi­na spent US$464.3bil­lion and had a R&D work­force of 2.9 mil­lion. T&T spends at the mo­ment vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing on R&D which per­tains di­rect­ly to in­no­va­tion and the ex­port of nov­el goods or ser­vices. Hence com­ment by the leader of the UNC should al­so ad­dress the pro­posed R&D bud­get.

To­day the fourth in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion’s new tech­nolo­gies in ro­bot­ics, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI), au­toma­tion, dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, sen­sors etc, are what dri­ve com­pet­i­tive­ness. Chi­na is work­ing in ar­eas which in­clude AI and the as­so­ci­at­ed new elec­tron­ic chips, quan­tum com­put­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly for the In­ter­net, rock­ets, sur­veil­lance, elec­tric and au­tonomous cars, high volt­age elec­tric trans­mis­sion, gene edit­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing any­thing you can think of. The US is en­gaged in sim­i­lar kinds of R&D, with spe­cial em­pha­sis on AI and ro­bot­ics. Be­sides the im­pact on prod­ucts and ser­vices, AI is hav­ing a game-chang­ing in­flu­ence on busi­ness and fi­nan­cial mod­els via big da­ta an­a­lyt­ics.

If we are to be glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive in our ex­ports we can­not spend the likes of what the US and Chi­na are do­ing and more so cov­er the same kind of range of top­ics; we have nei­ther the hu­man nor fi­nan­cial re­sources. Fur­ther, we can­not leave it to the whims of the pub­lic in the pro­posed in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor, to serendip­i­ty, as one man and his dog de­cide on ar­eas to de­vel­op, hope­ful­ly, prod­ucts and/or ser­vices for ex­port. The ag­glom­er­a­tion of the lim­it­ed R&D skills that we can muster in­to a few ar­eas is the best bet for us; ie, we have to choose a pri­ori what tech­nolo­gies or even parts of in­dus­tries in which we wish to work. This calls for a fore­sight­ing ex­er­cise sim­i­lar to that of the EDAB which was abort­ed. In oth­er words, the in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor should be pop­u­lat­ed by SMEs that were spun out of the ar­eas of R&D pre-se­lect­ed by the fore­sight­ing ex­er­cise.

The last time the UNC held the reins of gov­ern­ment its even­tu­al ven­ture in­to in­no­va­tion amount­ed to an “i2i” scheme which pro­duced noth­ing wor­thy of ex­ports and much talk about in­cu­ba­tors and in­no­va­tion which to date has come to naught, in the con­text of the scope of the for­eign ex­change rents earned by the en­er­gy sec­tor.

In Chi­na, a clus­ter of com­put­er com­pa­nies opened up in a chaot­ic cor­ner of the North West of Bei­jing, sim­i­lar pos­si­bly to the UNC’s in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor. How­ev­er, this cor­ner was near to the cam­pus­es of Peking and Ts­inghua uni­ver­si­ties which gave the re­quired R&D sup­port. This cor­ner de­vel­oped in­to what is now known as Zhong­guan­cun and is home to the tech­nol­o­gy gi­ants, Baidu, Di­di CHinx­ing and Meit­nan-Di­an­ping and al­so hous­es the re­search cen­tres of Mi­crosoft, Google, and IBM. This de­vel­op­ment is an amal­gam of R&D, the pri­vate sec­tor and gov­ern­ment fund­ing of re­search fa­cil­i­ties. This is in­deed the clas­sic Triple He­lix of Et­zkowitz and Ley­des­dorff which has dri­ven eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment in many of the G7 coun­tries and the suc­cess­es of some de­vel­op­ing economies.

Hence, it is point­less talk­ing about a dig­i­tal in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor with the hope of cre­at­ing a clus­ter of world-class ex­port com­pa­nies, with­out defin­ing how the lo­cal mod­el of the Triple He­lix will be im­ple­ment­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the cur­rent pri­vate sec­tor is set in its ways of us­ing the en­er­gy sec­tor rents to im­port, markup and sell lo­cal­ly and uni­ver­si­ties are vir­tu­al­ly un­fund­ed in R&D.

What ap­pears to be the ob­jec­tive of the in­no­va­tion cor­ri­dor is the de­vel­op­ment lo­cal­ly of a se­ries of com­plete val­ue chains by en­tre­pre­neurs and their re­lat­ed prod­uct/ser­vice, mar­ket de­vel­op­ment, mar­ket­ing, and sales. This is dif­fi­cult and will take a long time. How­ev­er, the sec­ond un­bundling of glob­al­i­sa­tion of­fers us the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be an off-shore pro­duc­er in an ex­ist­ing glob­al val­ue chain; in fact to de­vel­op our econ­o­my as Chi­na did. Though this out­sourc­ing is usu­al­ly to low-wage coun­tries and is at the whim of the home coun­try to choose where to out-source, it is pos­si­ble to be a spe­cialised com­po­nent man­u­fac­tur­er that de­pends on our own in­no­va­tions and not on low wages.

For ex­am­ple, Veleo of France is a spe­cial­ist man­u­fac­tur­er of air con­di­tion­ers for cars be­cause of its ex­cel­lence and not low wages.

The move by Chi­na in part to fund Phoenix in­dus­tri­al park and lo­cate some ten Chi­nese firms there could be part of an out­sourc­ing pro­gramme. How­ev­er, this would on­ly aid our eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment if via our own R&D ef­fort we can ben­e­fit, via new lo­cal com­pa­nies, from the spillovers of knowl­edge from these com­pa­nies.

Mary K King

St Au­gus­tine