#BTEditorial – Getting our moonshots off the ground – with R&D

“You’ve got big dreams, you want fame: well fame costs, and right here is where you start paying.” 

– Debbie Allen, “Fame”, 1980

During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union literally took technology to another level – to outer space – when it launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957. 

Caught off-guard, the United States took a few years to respond, but after successfully launching its first astronauts into space in 1961, President John F. Kennedy set his country the ambitious goal of putting a man on the surface of the moon by the end of the decade. 

This past July, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the day the late Neil Armstrong took that “one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind”.

How did the Americans achieve that goal? According to Curtis Gittens, a lecturer in Information Technology at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, speaking at a recent forum of the National Library Service he retraced the earliest bold steps towards the world’s first moonshot.

Gittens said: “When the United States got beaten by the Soviet Union in the “space race”, they looked for people who were doing innovative things in science and technology, and funded them. 

“That is how Silicon Valley in California, which became the ‘hotbed’ of development in Information and Communications Technology in the 1970s and 1980s came about.”

Barbados has set itself some lofty goals in the realm of technology – our own moonshots – that we would like to achieve by 2030, such as becoming fossil fuel-free, having a fleet of all-electric Government vehicles, and free broadband internet access throughout Bridgetown, among others. But how will we achieve all this?

There is no doubt that Barbados has had its fair share of innovators, who embraced the old Bajan proverb, “If you don’t a horse, ride a cow”. They came up with creative solutions to dilemmas they faced in agriculture, construction and renewable energy long before that became a global catchphrase. The work of James Husbands of Solar Dynamics and the late Professor Oliver Headley in the field of solar energy is well known and respected.

In more recent times, Carlton Cummins, a young man from Shop Hill in St. Thomas now based in the United Kingdom, along with a group of investors established Aceleron Limited, a company which processes old lithium-ion batteries – the type used in cell phones, computers and electric cars – for reuse before recycling, in order to extract more power, and value, out of them. In 2017, he received several international awards, including a place on Forbes Magazine’s list of 30 innovators under 30 years old.

Shamar Ward, a UWI student, is following in Cummins’ footsteps by reusing items that people tend to throw away. He has found a way to use old smartphones as sensors to track the movements of the university’s fleet of buses, and can eventually be used in other applications such as traffic management. According to reports, this unprecedented development has already caught the eye of the Chinese, who will no doubt maximise it.

We also have Kemar Codrington and Mikhail Eversley of Oasis Laboratories, who have been extracting chemical compounds from sargassum seaweed, breadfruit and tamarind to make a wide variety of natural cosmetic products including soaps.

So, we’ve got the talent; now what are we going to do with it? The answer, according to Gittens, is state-funded research and development. 

He declared: “If the Barbados Government took ten per cent of its annual budget for the Ministry of Education, say, an additional $10 million over 5 years, just $2 million a year and provide research and development funding to electronic engineers, biochemists, computer scientists, and physicists, and support that by incorporating the students in the development of new systems. 

“If you put the money into the local market, and develop between two and six applications you will end up saving between $20 and $25 million over that same five-year period, as opposed to importing these items and paying international consultants to do the same work.”

Roland Haggins, the CARICOM director for the digital infrastructure development company Nuco Global Inc – builders of Barbados’ first blockchain protocol, the Aion platform – has also suggested that we have to create an environment that nurtures research and development. 

Haggins said: “There are three core recommendations to ensure we have the right environment for innovation to flourish. 

“We need collaboration between different agencies, such as corporate groups, the Ministry of Labour because jobs will be affected, and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. 

“On top of that, we must ensure we have the right policies and regulations in place, because if we get it wrong, companies won’t come in and those already here will be hampered, and the final component is education.” 

Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects will be a key component in this drive. We also need to develop a greater level of respect for home-grown creatives. 

One of the major problems we have faced over the years is that we are always quick to embrace foreign experts’ solutions that are not always suitable for our conditions. This creates frustration among our own talented people who end up taking their skills elsewhere.

This Government does have ‘big dreams’; some of which we have set for ourselves, others most likely have been thrust upon us, but if we are serious about them, we would do well to employ the old SMART acronym to assess them – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely – and put the necessary tools in place to accomplish them. 

Once we do R&D right, we will gain the fame and fortune and respect we seek of being leaders in the Caribbean in renewable energy and in other fields of endeavor that will sustain us for years to come.