Focus on high-value ideas, deep tech, Caribbean told as summit opens

Caribbean nations must shift their focus towards high-value idea generation and deep tech to overcome the inherent limitations of small domestic markets and drive sustainable regional development, the technology minister urged as the Caribbean SEED (STEM Engine for Economic Development) Summit opened on Friday.

Senator Jonathan Reid, in a keynote speech at the Accra Beach Hotel, suggested that small geographic scales and limited land masses mean regional economies cannot rely on traditional, large-scale production to compete globally. Instead, the path forward requires capturing the highest value at the very beginning of the product lifecycle.

“If you’re from a small space, I think you have to have a reality of who you are,” Senator Reid said. “You don’t have a large market, you don’t have a large economy, you don’t have a large land mass.

So you’re not going to be doing many things that are of large scale production… Because we’re small, it makes sense to start at the beginning of this. It’s logical to me. And so you really, really need to be in the business of inception and business of ideas, the business of new value creation.”

The Caribbean SEED Summit serves as a primary vehicle for the Caribbean Science Foundation (CSF) to fulfil its mandate of regional economic development through the promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and technology entrepreneurship.

The current summit marked a major milestone by transitioning academic brilliance into corporate reality. Out of 28 submitted corporate strategies, 16 advanced startups were selected to pitch their ventures to global venture capitalists.

While the event was initially slated to be fully virtual due to tight budget constraints, Senator Reid said he personally intervened, getting Cabinet approval to finance an immersive, in-person summit here in partnership with the Future Barbados agency.

Looking to the future, Senator Reid expressed a strong desire to increase the pressure on regional innovators, pushing them to move past comfort zones and embrace the rigorous, often painful process of commercial vetting.

“We want to drive an appetite to create new value. You want to drive an appetite to take risks, you want to drive an appetite to innovate, but that has to be smart,” Reid concluded.

“And you have to solve things where you don’t have to be the starving scientist just like you don’t have to be the starving artist… The idea is, how can you be brave enough and position yourself to be the one that solves a really difficult, expensive problems from the Caribbean, and that’s our hope.”

A critical theme of the minister’s address was the need to reorient Caribbean research and innovation towards global commercial viability. He cautioned against dedicating finite resources to narrow, localised issues that lack a clear path to market success, urging innovators to pursue the sweet spot where critical socio-ecological problems intersect with commercial scalability.

“I think we made a mistake in the Caribbean. I think we spend a lot of time solving problems that don’t make money, that may be difficult problems, but there’s not a clear path for it to be commercially viable. And I think there’s a sweet spot between solving very important social problems and ecological problems, environmental problems, and deep tech long-term problems with creating a system that inherently, by the work it does, has the ability to generate lots and lots of commercial activity.”

He challenged the region’s scientific community to address issues that impose substantial local costs but offer massive international economic opportunities.

“How can you find that sweet spot of solving things that are inherently expensive here? They may be worth $100m or a billion dollars’ worth of a problem in Barbados. But it should be worth $1tn in the global economy, right? And if you’re able to do that, then you have something that is potentially a good market for it and create great value.”

To establish Barbados as a premier global hub for research and development, Senator Reid called for immediate reform in how state entities, academic institutions and the private sector interact. He characterised the current ecosystem as an adversarial, fragmented relationship that stifles progress, proposing instead a collaborative framework where each sector plays to its unique strengths.

“I think there’s an adverse relationship between universities, private sector, and government, right? It’s this weird non-functioning triangle that exists that I don’t think needs to exist,” Senator Reid said.

“Ultimately, if the government is the owner of the public problems which are expensive—so crime, road infrastructure, sargassum, climate, all those things that are trillion-dollar problems—and universities is a space where you have the intellectual capital to be applied towards solving problems in a way that hasn’t been solved before, and then you have private capital which has the discipline and muscle and risk appetite to go towards turning ideas into actual products… Why aren’t they working together?”

What to know – Caribbean Science Foundation

Celebrating 16 years of operation, the Caribbean Science Foundation (CSF) — a non-profit, non-governmental organisation run by interim leadership — has historically focused on grassroots educational reforms. Key initiatives include:

• SPISE (Student Programme for Innovation in Science and Engineering): Running since 2012, this flagship initiative has trained 265 elite students, sending 32 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and many others to Ivy League universities.
• Regional coding and robotics bootcamps: Specialised summer programmes introducing youth to Python and machine learning.
• The Caribbean STEM Olympiads: A rewards-based tournament offering cash prizes to foster global competitiveness among top regional students.
• BRIC (Barbados Robotics Innovation Challenge): Funded by the Abed Foundation, this initiative challenges local minds to build functional, agricultural robots capable of harvesting coconuts safely.

(RR)