An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

En­tre­pre­neur­ship is the gate­way growth across mul­ti­ple pro­duc­tive sec­tors of the econ­o­my, ac­cord­ing to ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion, Nigel Ed­wards.

Speak­ing at the Ur­pre­neur­Plus – Win­ners’ Cir­cle Re­cep­tion at UTC head­quar­ters on In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain, Ed­wards said there is sig­nif­i­cant im­por­tance for en­tre­pre­neurs in the na­tion­al eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

He said the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion sees it as its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to take ac­tion that will ready young en­tre­pre­neurs for mean­ing­ful growth.

He said the UTC’s part­ner­ship with UWI Ven­tures in the cre­ation of Ur­pre­neur­Plus pro­vides a sup­port­ive and en­abling en­vi­ron­ment for the growth of the en­tre­pre­neurs.

“Many of the great com­pa­nies of the world were hatched from ideas like yours, peo­ple wrote busi­ness plans just like you, and those are now bil­lion-dol­lar com­pa­nies list­ed on glob­al stock ex­changes,” the ex­ec­u­tive high­light­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to Ed­wards, Ur­pre­neur­Plus is it­self an in­no­va­tion and it’s in­tend­ed to ad­dress some of the crit­i­cal gaps for some of the small busi­ness­es, which in­clude cre­at­ing aware­ness of the is­sues that re­quire con­sid­er­a­tion by every busi­ness, such as:

• ↓How are these small busi­ness­es ad­dress­ing the im­pact of a wave of “poly-crises” that is sweep­ing the globe;

• ↓What should be your con­sid­er­a­tions re­lat­ing to digi­ti­sa­tion;

• ↓The im­pact of AI on your busi­ness;

• ↓What are the ESG and sus­tain­abil­i­ty im­pli­ca­tions for my small busi­ness.

Ed­wards said these are just some ex­am­ples of what EVERY busi­ness must be think­ing about to­day.

He said an­oth­er gap is how to think about tal­ent ac­qui­si­tion and skills de­vel­op­ment, so the Ur­pre­neur­Plus pro­gramme was de­signed to bring crit­i­cal skills to these small and emerg­ing busi­ness­es.

Mar­ket ac­qui­si­tion and think­ing about mar­ket ac­cess, how do these small busi­ness­es start by build­ing scale in­to their ear­ly busi­ness mod­el?

The ex­ec­u­tive said to meet UTC’s ob­jec­tives, it pro­vid­ed fund­ing for three tracks of en­tre­pre­neurs.

Tier 3: for mi­cro-en­ter­pris­es— $50,000 per com­pa­ny

Tier 2: for small en­ter­pris­es $ 250,000 each

Tier 1: A small en­ter­prise po­ten­tial­ly ready for list­ing on the ju­nior stock ex­change will re­ceive an in­vest­ment of $1 mil­lion.

Al­so speak­ing was Ju­lian Hen­ry, chief op­er­a­tions of­fi­cer UWI Ven­tures Ltd who told the en­tre­pre­neurs that in­no­va­tion is im­por­tant.

“In­no­va­tion is fun­da­men­tal to suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neur­ship. When we say some­one is a good en­tre­pre­neur, what you re­al­ly are look­ing at is that per­son’s abil­i­ty to adapt and adopt and im­ple­ment new things to com­pete in an en­vi­ron­ment not just with­in your lo­cal en­vi­ron­ment, but re­gion­al­ly, in­ter­na­tion­al­ly as well. In­no­va­tion is some­thing that is chal­leng­ing, hard and takes a lot of work,” Hen­ry added.

The Tier one win­ner of the Ur­pre­neur­Plus was Kath­leen Joseph, of Trini­bakes, Tier 2 win­ner was Niki­ta Legall of the Caribbean Com­posters, while Da­reem Jef­fery, Eco Wash emerged as the Tier 3 win­ner.