Business
World Bank says that the Caribbean is a source of prodigious talent & depth of ideas
For Gareth and the other winners of Digital Jam 3.0,, the next step really is serious, said the World Bank, stating that pledges were made across two days to “incubate and develop the talent found in the Caribbean, with the aim of transforming them from ideas to a profitable business model, which hopefully will inspire the next generation of app developers in the Caribbean.
“We view the digital economy as a way to harness the enormous creativity that exists in the country and our job is to be the enablers,” Jamaica’s Minister of State for Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Julian Robinson, told the World Bank. “To take that creativity, covert it into businesses and earn foreign exchange and facilitate economic growth.”
The World Bank said a “real desire exists among the public and private sector to harness this intellectual talent and turn it into a powerful catalyst to kick start the region’s stalling economies.” However, it said, while the entrepreneurial spirit abounds, wide changes are needed in order to transform potential into reality, both within Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
“Small developing countries like ours require this kind of innovation in order to make the leap we need to make and that’s what we have to do,” said Gary Sinclair, chief executive officer of LIME Jamaica, which sponsored the event. “We literally have to leapfrog generations of legacies, instead of sort of sitting back and having these kinds of technologies just sort of beat up on us rather than adding value to it ourselves,” he added.
Copyright Caribbean360 2014
