The Government of Belize, through its Economic Development Council, is seeking to grow Belize's economy through technology and innovation.
To do this, they've partnered with the Complete Caribbean Partnership Facility. Complete Caribbean is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Government of the UK under its UK Aid program, the Caribbean Development Bank, and the Government of Canada. It seeks to stimulate economic growth throughout 13 countries across the Caribbean, through technology and innovation.
The Economic Development Council and Complete Caribbean invited interested individuals who make up Belize's public and private sectors, as well as the academia, and those who work within the different industries, to participate in a workshop at the Biltmore Plaza hotel. It was called "Towards Exponential growth in Belize: A workshop on unleashing innovation within the private sector".
To demonstrate how exactly technology and innovation could power an economy, the facilitators brought in experts from Ruta N, an organization from the Colombian City of Medellin. That city has enabled its residents to become successful entrepreneurs, and today, the participants of this workshop learned exactly how they did it.
We stopped by to find out how exactly Belize intends to adopt the Medellin model, and here's what the experts told us:
Sylvia Dohnhert - Exec. Dir., Complete Caribbean
"This is a program that is focused on developing the private sector in the Caribbean through innovation, and it is financed by the Inter-American Development Bank, by the Government of the United Kingdom, the Caribbean Development Bank, and by the Government of Canada."
"The world is living a technological revolution, which creates enormous opportunities for the countries to develop. It's going to be a shift in technological paradigms, and our goal for this even [is] by bringing the experience of Ruta N, which is an organization in Medellin, which supports innovation in the private sector, is to bring knowledge about instruments, policies, and mechanism to increase innovation throughout the economy of Belize, increase the use of these technologies as well, so that Belize can grow exponentially, the way the City of Medellin has grown over the last 6 to 10 years."
Ishmael Quiroz - Exec. Dir., Economic Development Council
"Together with the Complete Caribbean facility, the Economic Development Council is co-hosting today's workshop, which is a follow-up on the Prime Ministers business forum, which focused on the theme of innovation. The theme for this workshop is actually 'Unleashing Innovation within the Private Sector', and it's all towards increasing growth exponentially in Belize. What we're doing, through access to an international expert on innovation, is learning from the City of Medellin's experience, with doing things different, bringing people together, having a unified vision for solving problems, and adapting to technology, as well as just a different approach. And so, we want to learn from that. In applying it to the local context, who we have participating are a cross-section of academia, private sector, industry, as well as government. And the idea is to really have a working session to identify specific problems, that are facing different sectors in the innovation ecosystem, and come up with basic action plans that we can go after, tackle, and find a better way of doing things."
Alejandro Delgado - Representative, Ruta N, Medellin
"How can we all get together, private sector, academy and government, put together a plan, with some key performance indicators, and collaborate with each other to full-fill those goals using science, technology and innovation. So basically, how can we put ourselves all together, looking forward to become the Belize of the future, what do we want to be, and put a plan with funds, and the plan is done, and everyone is accountable for that."
Reporter
"Okay, so give us examples of how Medellin achieved this, so that our viewers will be able to understand what exactly is the concept."
Alejandro Delgado
"Basically, we said that we want to invest a percent of the GDP, the gross domestic product, in science, technology, and innovation, to increase productivity, and reduce poverty. We have indicators for each one of those, and what we did is we created the capacities in the innovation ecosystem of the city, so more research facilities, more incubators for entrepreneurs, venture capital, more people studying STEM related, or science and technology, engineering, math careers. So, you create the demand in the world, get together the demand with the supply of people and talent, and funds. So, how can you use funds in research and development to create knowledge, and then this knowledge to create innovation, so that that it returns funds to do more research and development."
As you heard, the key elements of Medellin's success is to invest a part of that city's GDP to create facilities which educate and train interested persons in science and technology. They created incubators for this type of study, and once the young entrepreneurs were properly trained, they had access to funding, and the support of potential investors, in a revolving cycle, so that the program eventually pays for itself and grows the economy of that city.
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