By: Staff Writer
October 10, 2023
The Caribbean Export Development Agency (CEDA) executive director said that innovation and digitisation is “critical” for the ease of doing business in the Caribbean as the agency launches the Caribbean Digital Transformation Institute (CDTI) in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Deodat Maharaj, said at the launch of the CDTI that because two thirds of all businesses in the Caribbean can be classified as Small and Medium Sized businesses (SMEs) and making up over 60 percent of all employment, the need for the CDTI is “critical,” to helping drive innovation and digitisation and at the same time helping those businesses being able to compete in a “hyper competitive world,” because the region is “way behind.”
Mr Maharaj added: “This digital transformation Institute we are launching today will establish a programme that will that will use a data and knowledge driven approach to first help our Caribbean businesses understand and then check the level of adoption of digital technologies, practices and processes. This is precisely what the digital check-up tool that we are unveiling today will help all businesses do.”
The newly-launched Caribbean Digital Transformation Institute (CDTI), will provide regional micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) with access to a self-assessed Digital Check-Up tool to gage their ‘digital maturity’ and then produce a tailored e-learning plan to improve their technological capabilities.
The three-year project, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Compete Caribbean, will also analyse the data gathered by the digital check-up and make it publicly available to various business support organisations and other interested parties to inform policy decisions affecting MSMEs.
Sylvia Dohnert, executive director of the Compete Caribbean and private sector lead specialist at the Competitiveness, Technology and Innovation Division of the IDB, also said that the tool was already launched in the wider Latin American region and has been received with great enthusiasm by the private sector and governments alike. “Especially within the IDB and hearing about this enthusiasm in the other countries, we thought we should really bring this to the Caribbean, I mean, it could have a huge impact on the Caribbean.”
She also said: “What we were doing was trying to understand what were the innovation patterns of businesses in the region. These are businesses of all sizes. So generally, innovation is new products and services that are not digital.
“Digital Innovation is a little bit of a misnomer, because it could be new products and services that are digitally based, but also the adoption of digital technology per se.”