Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, Has­sel Bac­chus, is re­it­er­at­ing the im­por­tance of in­no­va­tion and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion which are crit­i­cal el­e­ments in eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

He made the com­ments while speak­ing at Tues­day’s launch of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank’s (IDB) the Emerg­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry – Tech­Lab Trinidad and To­ba­go Hub which is de­signed to ac­cel­er­ate the adop­tion of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies for sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment across the Caribbean.

In laud­ing the con­tin­ued ef­forts of the IDB to up­lift T&T, Bac­chus said in­no­va­tors and  en­tre­pre­neurs now have a lab­o­ra­to­ry where they can go and test ideas and in­vent, there­by do­ing their part to fos­ter a greater econ­o­my and coun­try. 

“And of course it pro­vides a phys­i­cal space out­fit­ted with all of the things that comes with that, which al­lows them to be more cre­ative and prob­lem solv­ing and ad­dress all these is­sues,” he added.

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Pen­ne­lope Beck­les-Robin­son who al­so spoke, echoed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments about the im­por­tance of in­no­va­tion.

How­ev­er, she al­so not­ed this is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant to growth in the pri­vate sec­tor.

“Fa­cil­i­tat­ing ac­cess to our in­no­va­tion by in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets must be a pri­or­i­ty, but in­no­va­tion in our mu­sic, food, in­dige­nous tech­nol­o­gy, prod­ucts, ser­vices and cul­tur­al events must be im­per­a­tive,” said Beck­les-Robin­son.

In his re­marks at the event, Jor­dan Schwartz, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent and chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer of the IDB, shared that he spent most of his ca­reer work­ing on in­fra­struc­ture, fi­nance and reg­u­la­tion, which in­vovled trans­port and pow­er sys­tems as well as en­er­gy and wa­ter.

Tech­nol­o­gy, Schwartz said, has com­plete­ly trans­formed the work of the IDB.

“When I start­ed, I start­ed in the mar­itime sec­tor, try­ing how to fig­ure out how to bring pri­vate in­vest­ment in­to ports....Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean from Mex­i­co down to the south­ern tip of Ar­genti­na there were no con­tain­er cranes any­where in the re­gion.

“And the in­tro­duc­tion of ship-to-shore cranes kind of rev­o­lu­tionised the way in which the re­gion trades. Seems like some­thing so big and clunky now, but it was a tech­nol­o­gy that was in­tro­duced some­what slow­ly in­to the re­gion. But once it got start­ed, there was no kind of turn­ing back. And ships, in­stead of wait­ing for five days at ports can come in and drop off con­tain­ers and pick up con­tain­ers and get out in four or five hours. It com­plete­ly changed the way in which goods moved and the cost of those goods and it im­proved pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion,” Schwartz said.

The spir­it be­hind tech hubs, he added, is “not nec­es­sar­i­ly buy­ing the toys and telling each oth­er what toys we should be play­ing with in that sand­box. The best we can do is pro­vide that sand­box.”