The first and sec­ond run­ners-up in the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T's (UTT) fourth an­nu­al Busi­ness Plan Com­pe­ti­tion have re­ceived $10,000 cheques from Evolv­ing Tec­Knolo­gies and En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (e-TecK). An­gela Hor­datt, vice-pres­i­dent, busi­ness de­vel­op­ment at e-TecK, made the pre­sen­ta­tion at a Ju­ly 15 func­tion at UTT's O'Meara cam­pus. E-TecK said in a state­ment that it has been spon­sor­ing and sup­port­ing the com­pe­ti­tion for the past four years. "It is hoped that the bud­ding en­tre­pre­neur­ial tal­ent emerg­ing from this and fu­ture com­pe­ti­tions would di­rect­ly feed in­to the planned In­no­va­tion Cen­tre at the re­gion's first sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy fa­cil­i­ty–Tamana In­Tech Park.

The UTT is the ed­u­ca­tion­al plat­form which will ful­fil the tech­ni­cal, re­search and de­vel­op­ment needs for es­tab­lished and start-ups at Tamana In­Tech Park. "This link­age would aid in tak­ing ideas through the grow­ing stages and in­to the fi­nal stages of com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion," E-TecK said in the state­ment. Carl Fran­cis, per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, speak­ing on be­half of Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz, said com­pe­ti­tions such as these pro­mot­ed healthy link­ages be­tween cre­ative, tech­no­log­i­cal and ed­u­ca­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties, which, in turn, sup­port­ed in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship in T&T. "In­no­v­a­tive­ness is nat­ur­al to us as Trin­bag­o­ni­ans, the chal­lenges fac­ing T&T to­day re­quire that in­creas­ing num­bers of our cit­i­zens are af­ford­ed the kind of ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion that pro­duces these types of in­no­va­tors, to be here to­day," said Mar­garet Richard­son, per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion.

First place win­ners were Abi­gail Liv­er­pool and Giselle Lewis, of Or­gan­i­cy­cle. "The com­pe­ti­tion gave her the op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring her ideas to fruition by man­ag­ing a small start-up com­pa­ny for turn­ing waste in­to or­gan­ic mat­ter for plant­i­ng," Liv­er­pool said. Cherisse Fer­reira, one of the cre­ators of Bam­busa Ltd, a bam­boo man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, which placed sec­ond, said she and her team most val­ued the ex­po­sure. "We were able to get to ex­press a dif­fer­ent side oth­er than acad­e­mia–the prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic knowl­edge was a wel­come change," Fer­reira said in the state­ment.