Is There a Sexy Way to Say I want to Rape You?
Submitted by David Weekes
For there to be any effective investment in Innovation by Bajans, ONE HAS TO HAVE THE VISION TO innovate!
I once heard the brain challenge/puzzle given where a man comes to a 4 cross roads and the sign is broken at its base. The query is now does he get to where he is going if the sign is down?
All sorts of hare-brained ideas are presented; aligning the breaks at the base of a post which has rotted, getting a compass, asking a villager, all solutions that are outside of the parameters of the puzzle and are therefore moot. Of course the answer lies in the fact, because he knows where he has come from, once he fixes the post so that the name on the sign from where he came is pointing back to that direction, he will know where he is going to.
The simple issue that we are facing in Barbados is that, those who have been appointed to chart the azimuth for innovation, do not have a clue about where we have come from, not even the least idea where we are going and certainly have even less of an idea about how to inventory our HR and other resources critical to INNOVATE.
Some years ago I went to a meeting where I presented a solution for Border Travel. The person conducting the evaluation for this regional Innovation facility asked the question “where in the United States did the idea come from?” She like many could neither see the idea nor believe that it was indigenous. Meet Boyan Slat, the inventor behind a possible solution to the ocean’s plastic pollution. Slat is only 20 years old but his idea may have a huge impact. It has to come from overseas for Bajans to accept anything.
Now the point I want to make at the onset of this submission is, it is not that we do not have inventors like Slat here in Barbados, I myself met a young woman who was able to come up with an invention to address the sargassum weed across the beaches in Barbados, no, it is that we do not have people who have the ability and vision to “see” the solution!! Our problem is more potent. Blatant Wastage. US$2M from World Bank wasted at the ** Commission on what was a fiasco to pretend to assist young people, but who gives a “really bad curse word”?
So, is there a sexy way for someone to say, I want to rape you? Yes there is . We have a phenomena appearing across Barbados – ‘ Venture Capitalists outfits – which, according to a recent conversation with the ** Consultant from **, “these fellows are a band of small businessmen who are not driven by any real conviction to Innovate, but are your local equivalent of what the United States calls “trolls””. He confides further “here is a gang of fellows, with a few dollars in their pockets, without any idea about what is “innovation”, but have ganged together to launch what is only a sophisticated “tax reduction” concept. The idea is quite a gem – a two pronged initiative conducted by our local equivalent of “Innovation Trolls”.
Part One. How do I, under the guise of supporting small businesses, get a government to “write off” monies that are ostensibly for Innovation and small business spectrum?
Followed by “How do we get ourselves appointed to manage any international $$ that are earmarked for this area, sizable monies by the way, if not by and through this pretense?”
So how do we do it? “
We put up say $10K a piece, 50 of us, to seed a 1/2 million kitty BUT, AND HERE IS THE KICKER, because we have seeded the facility, we are now open to matching funds of $5M from development agencies WHICH, because we are “OFF SCOPE”, no one can touch us!!” All we have to do is make some really pretty videos of us pretending to make INNOVATION work.
Part TWO. HOW TO RAPE IGNORANT PEOPLE – Operationalizing the Exercise. We set up a competition under the guise of say some bona fide organization, inviting all and sundry to compete for a first prize of $5,000. That is a lot of money to us innovators and inventors. So people like me and the innovators around Barbados enter and submit our IP, without any Non Disclosure agreement, to this nameless entity. 2,000 of us bright Bajans make this online submission and one of us wins.
Lights action, CBC, Nation and Advocate plaster our mugs all over the media WHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH, 1,999 brilliant ideas have been RAPED from the ignorant unsuspecting Bajan masses and for $1.25 cents my bonafide organization has been able to “willingly misappropriate” 1,999 ideas.
Are you understanding this!
Is this ignorant fellow Weekes getting through to you gents and ladies?
Barbados Underground 
David W, you are heard loudly and clearly but the ringing in my ears is not a new pain.
Any young inventor or entrepreneur in the modern era has ever ability to understand the pitfalls of exposing his/her ideas to VCs or competitions of the type you mentioned.
Of course each inventor can’t necessarily afford a lawyer but they either use the available tools to research their options or they can definitely get burned.
The anecdotes back in the day – and as you suggest even now – are told of prospective businessmen going to the banker with a super plan for a new business; presenting all the required details and plans but being denied for lack of collateral or supposed lack of viability. Yet, months later to see the same plan crystalized by another seasoned businessman…who happens to be a close friend and associate of the banker who denied the plan.
Old talk, yes. But the modern issues mirror that type of whisper talk.
Not a lawyer, but in the absense of a tight non-disclosure, an established patent or restrictions established by the VCs to safeguard proprietary info there is only one other way to avoid the predicament you noted.
And that is, keep your idea under wraps until you can get the funds to go to market. And that of course is the infuriating catch-22 !
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@Dee Word
Isn’t yours a simplistic view? Before a budding inventor/creator assumes a label of serious proportion aren’t they searching to find recognition? What makes it all the more difficult in this part of the world is the lack of a framework/expertise and respect for copywriter/patent work.
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Mr. D Ingrunt Word
How many inventors out there, “who cannot afford a lawyer” as part of this nascent Innovation arena, understand the complexities of finding and thereafter implementing an infallible NDA?
That is an oxymoron isn’t it? Let us work through that one to see how it words in practice.
First let me deal with ““Specified Period”. This clause, as simple as it is needs to be addressed and may read “…means the period of 5 years from the date on which this agreement terminates, whether by the effluxion of time or otherwise..”
Where do you, without the benefit of legal insight, get the advise, and the balls to insist that someone from whom you are seeking say $150,000 in investment, must sign your “affliction of time” clause? Now if you don’t include it, the person who you are dialoguing with can go the following day and pursue your concept.
Then there is the obligations clause(s)
“You undertake:
(a) to keep the Confidential Information secret;
(b) to use the Confidential Information only for the Permitted Purpose
(c) not to disclose the Confidential Information to anyone or to make Copies of it unless this agreement allows you to do so; and
(d) to ensure that Copies are protected against theft or unauthorised access and that no one receives Confidential Information from you unless authorised, in accordance with the terms of this agreement.
I can tell you, WITHOUT any reservation, NOT ONE OF THE so-called micro enterprise development institutions in Barbados those that are mandate to help small businesses WILL SIGN A NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT with their charges!
In fact I will even send you an email where I had to get a “Cease and Desist Letter” sent to a mentor of a specific micro-enterprise development institution after said mentor was caught trying to steal the said solution!
Now Mr. D. Ingrunt Word, let us talk about this dispassionately.
Here we have people who are tasked with the responsibility of assisting innovators and inventors BECOMING the competitors of the very people that they are supposed to be helping!
What is the recourse to the budding innovator? Especially in a country where there is only ONE qualified Patent Lawyer? You do know that we only have one qualified patent lawyer who is registered to practice patent Law in the United States of America, do you?
You understand why I used rape in this context?
It is a sad day when in the presence of a Micro Enterprise Development Institution spectrum of BIDC, Fund Access, Enterprise Growth Fund Limited and the others whose names I have forgotten, agencies which are funded by government to support Innovation, that you now state that “you keep your idea under wraps until you can get the funds to get to market”
The World of Innovation DOES NOT STAND STILL Mr. D. Ingrunt Word while you get up to speed and it is precisely for this reason that we WILL NEVER BE A SINGAPORE O A SILICON VALLEY like the pipe dreamers at the Barbados Entrepreneurial Foundation and my colleague from the Nation’s Editorial so blissfully promote.
INNOVATION NEEDS VISION & COMMITMENT and action not pretty words and the lip service of consecutive administrations.
25 years from now, under whatever administration that is in power at that time, Barbados will be still here bullsh**ing about “needing to support Innovation and Barbados as the Innovation Hub of 2040 (we would have replaced the 2020 in the current fancy jingle by then)
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Mr. David the Blogmaster
I want to comment on your remark about “the lack of a framework”
Of all the agencies that do exist to assist the Innovator and Inventor and which have taken an active position in this Innovation Space, Iw would wish to give you the InterAmerican Development Bank, specifically its Innovation window.
They do not play with the stringent requirements associated with Intellectual Property and they are probably the only regional player that enforces IP and Due Diligence protocols AS IT SHOULD BE DONE.
From the clerk to the consultant any and everyone who works with you undergoes the most stringent of NDA procedures to ensure that no one who comes into contact with your IP/project can seek to rip you off.
They are thorough.
They are not the fly by night artistes who, under the guise of assisting regional Small Business entities set up elaborate pitches and trick the other “development agencies” with bells and whistles and fancy indigenous shark tank gameshows.
Let me give you an example of the professional nature of the IDB vis a vis the posturers.
The accounting firm that the IDB had effect the due diligence of my firm, was NOT A BAJN FIRM or one that had had any connection with my company!! If yu ef with the IDB they will publish all indiscretions that will affect your credibility forever!!
Enter this other posturing Regional Development firm which secures hundred of thousands of dollars for the ** to orchestrate an investment/shark tank exercise in London around World Cup time!!
Everyone is flown there, some first class, but as incredible as it might seem, none of the so called investors has signed an NDA with the hosting agency!!
Imagine this Mr. Blogmaster.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a exercise where people are going to be disclosing confidential information to a set of investors WHO HAVE NOT SIGNED NDAs!!
Fortunately I am a man who keeps my email and extensive documentation of these types of skullduggery masquerading as facilitators of regional investment so I have no fear of my uttering libelous statements. This email thing is something I recommend to all of you aspiring innovators and inventors, once they put it in writing, you have nothing to fear.
Oh yes, make sure that you copy it to offsite locations, just in case
But whose fault is it that these intermediaries are able to rape the pools of these dwindling development agency resources? Is it the politicians who get free and easy money to support national indicative programs?
Is it “smart operators” whose project documents are so constructed to satisfy the development agencies, while they purchase paintings from the ** to adorn passageways and lobbies, buy matching “his and hers” Range Rovers, buy electric cars to appease **, or they hire their friends at their serfdoms and fire anyone who has the balls to question their authority, for example to say that they are stealing development money?
Is it the lax development agencies which in an effort to justify their country offices and big up salaries cast a blind eye to these acts of open pillaging and rape, maybe it is that they find themselves unable to comment because ** did buy ** from ** and if that fact was know at our HQ in ** it might lead to dismissal as happened with Pla*** from ***?
Or is it our fault David, where we just do not care anymore about what is the right thing to do SO LONG AS WE GET OUR PIECE?
Like i said I am on the 12.41 train bound to eternity and it is not my intention to “go quietly into the night….”
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We watched the drama between Pulitzer and Hearst, between Philo Farmsworth and RCA and must support the conclusions of David Weekes.
In do so we find it counter-intuitive that a country whose only real national resources are said to be people, a country which has spent large portions of its treasury on ‘education, a country which more and more has to operate within a global space where business as usual will be less usual and more business, that inventors would not be the most precious resource of all.
If knowledge-based industries are to be helpful to this here nation, where is the wisdom to employ that knowledge? We say this talk is only about talking, we can’t be serious. Quintessential Bajan!
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David BU, not simplistic at all. The issues explained by Weekes are profound but unfortunately there are the bedrock of why lawyers are so successful…dispute and business subterfuge. The catch 22 I mentioned is clearly a non-solution but as a last resort it’s an only solution.
@David W, it is obviously shocking that a Micro DEVELOPMENT Funding agency is not specifically guiding and advising it’s young stars on the needs of NDAs and the pitfalls therein.
I have no interaction or experience with the Bdos Micro Funding agencies but as you describe it’s obvious they are just lenders of capital and are not focused on innovation and development. I have absolutely no answers to the predicament.
I have sat on the side of the business table across from the idea person and have worked on a few NDAs over the years. And as I am sure you know there is always a danger with these things which have absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty.
Refusal to sign NDA can be a practical matter in some cases – very few, of course, we can agree. Your presentation may be number 50 seen over the last two or five years by some of those investors at the VC or at the business meeting to invite a partner. They may have plans bubbling that actually already incorporate some aspects of your plan – not your plan directly but some similar ideas developed over the years.
So in that sense it iscrucial that the agency and the executives are bona-fide otherwise you have to step back.
As you said, the “World of Innovation DOES NOT STAND STILL …”.
As previously noted it would be great if you are able to use your now vast experience to pull together investors and be a leader of a VC incubator team to properly shepherd cutting edge innovative ideas without the theft and back-room shenanigans even as you progress your own major project (or at minimum be a solid resource).
Difficult but not impossible.
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Here is a question BU posted elsewhere where the top tier academics and intellectuals abound. What is the purpose of investing so much in education and the system stifles the creativity of the alumni? Focus on dismantling the system and not Weekes. Perhaps this is why Weekes is doing what he is doing.
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Mr. Pachamama
The 12.41 am trains made me wonder recently about how do we arrive at “The Measure of a Man?”
Do we use Will Smith’s “8 Pound” of the recyclable parts that we can leave after we depart this sphere? Our refrigerated parts – the working heart, kidneys, eyes, organs that can be transplanted to arrive at what we are worth” or is it some other unit of imperial measure or finite unit that we have yet to ascertain much like we have discovered that the atom is not the smallest indivisible piece of matter?
How then do we measure man then, what he has been to a significant other, his family friends, community, nation, world? Will it become some Richter scale variant showing capacity values in one area and deficits in another?
You alluded to the $500 million that we expend every year on education. But like any good accountant who seeks to balance his books, as a nation which would then seek to measure our success in our use of these funds, it appears as if we either (i) do not have any such tools of measurement in place or (ii) if we do have them, are afraid to use said tools because it will show up the colossal deficits that we have racked up.
I believe it is much more frightening than either of the two aforestated things Mr. Pachamama.
I went to school which had “two fields” a small field and a big field and it was possible that you could be on the small field playing while they were waiting for you on the big field. Stasis has kept our nation in the classroom, NOT ON EITHER FIELD, with a group of “classroom deciders” ( I love that comic Bush) who are unwilling, and incapable, of letting us out of the class, because, once we get out, they fear that we will not come back into the classroom.
Spiteful minded teachers who, to show their power, give you a detention in the last week of your last term at school, because they DONT WANT YOU ON THAT FIELD. Left to them, people of your ilk, would not have been allowed in that classroom, furthermore at that school.
For them Lee Kuan Yew, Silicon Valley, the Irish Tiger and these notable examples of “achievement against the odds” are to be revered and preserved, not followed far less excelled.
Because, having an Arthur Edwards who outshines Madame Tussauds artisans of London, or a Graeme Downes, or a Graeme Best who rivals Bill Gates or any of the hundreds of Brilliant Bajans, who excel in their respective areas and are supported by the mechanisms in a way to show that brilliance would mean one thing for these “GATEKEEPERS”
They would have to relearn the history of the world that they imbibed so well. Furthermore that relearning would show how incompetent they are when what they have learnt by ROTE is no longer en vogue.
We are governed by gatekeepers whose “measure of value” is fixed imutably in “12 pence one shilling, 20 shillings one pound” so they CANNOT, AND WILL NOT, let go of these sacred values in deference to one which just ask them to convert to “what is my value to my nation?”
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@ David Weekes
Well, we agree and know how you feel. A few decades ago we tried to build a five star hotel in Barbados, long before these kinds of ideas were in ‘bogue’. Government people and bankers use to pretend to welcome us but as soon as we left the room they would be laughing at us and making jokes that we thought we were Donald Trump.
Even after we were able to provably bring funding to the table, government refuse to remove the types of barriers they could now remove for Stewart and company.
David, you may eventually have to consider locating your business in a more understanding domicile because there will have to be a TOTAL destruction in Bartown before national projects, such as you, could be respected, supported.
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@ Mr. D. Ingrunt Word
I have an answer to the problem that we are facing with Innovation and Invention being stuck where it is.
Any officer except possibly the CEO of a Micro Enterprise Development Institution tasked with the responsibility of support our National Innovation thrust should be employed on a commission basis.
You take this job based on your ability to successfully manage a portfolio of successful projects which are chosen by virtue of another metric that is not “this is the minister’s best friend’s daughter nephew son”
What are the tools needed to manage the intake of these projects? Go to the IDB and get them to pilot such an agency, which runs concurrent with the same MicroEnterprise Development Institutions that “posture” right now.
Get it funded and facilitated for a year under their Innovation Funding Window and see if after a year when the evaluation is done, how that entity measures up against the other ones with their millions in subvention.
Even if the bank pays the officers transport costs and a nominal salary “like the late David Thompson’s lunch money and bus fare concept” at least what we end up with is people who are driven by national service and NOT puling a salary every 26th of the month, irrespective of whether your portfolio is successful of if the ignorant cockroach lacquering memorabilia factory is failing.
We are dealing with times where ONLY SUCCESS CAN BE ACCEPTED.
Why take 100,000 dollars and divide it between 1,000 people equally (undercapitalizing them by $9,000) and all of them fail as opposed to carefully choosing 10 for whom $10,000 will properly capitalize them and having 50% success?
Stop wasting the people’s money!
And when wanna picking the board of directors for that board, for the Good Lord’s Sake, picking a man or a woman whose only claim to fame is that they coordinated your campaign in Constituency Polling District ME1, IS NOT THE BASIS OF STAFFING THE DECISION MAKING MECHANISM OF AN ORGANIZATION TASKED WITH DEVELOPING A SOUND INNOVATION AND INVENTION environment!!
The reason we are failing is because successive governments are choosing ignorant swine as decision makers and then wondering how the agency messing up!!
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@DavidW
The issue is bigger. What is the role of NGOs and other actors in civil society? The system must feel pressure. Where is the fourth estate for example?
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Mr. Blogmaster
“Only diamond, or harder substances’ can cut diamond.”
“….. Over the past twenty-five years, social awareness and changing perceptions about the potentialities of CSOs and citizenship management have been decisive elements effecting this movement.
Thus, from the smallest neighbourhood-based group to the most sophisticated NGO, local initiative and the practical deployment of ordinary people are changing traditional notions about how we do ‘development’ in this island.
These processes will require greater definition of the CSO arena in Barbados. Special attention to institutional relationships and efficient information exchange within our development sector will also be pivotal.”
That is the introductory paragraph of a consultancy in support of the establishment of a Civil Society entity, thirteen years ago.”
The entity that funded that study realized that after paying the fee what it saw was the total disorder and immaturity in our NGO/CGO community which while there was a register of some 1500 registered organizations really only had about 100 active organizations of which 70 were talk shops
The only serious NGO in Barbados then and now is Pinelands Creative Workshop. Now I am not talking about vibrant dance groups etc, i am talking about NGOs with an active national mandate.
Where is the fourth estate?
To answer that I will commit the sin of Wikipedia that Dr. GP speaks of here regularly and use this article on “balls or testicles (from Latin testiculus, diminutive of testis, meaning “witness” of virility,[1] plural testes) is the male gonad in animals.”
We have become a society of men with small balls, eunuchs, who bestride the globe marked as “real men” because of the size of our wallets, who we can buy off, or give the secret handshake to, and call brother and have them do us a favor like loose a court file, things like this.
Look at us as we grovel here on the internet, behind colourful false names because, even though we know a thing is wrong, and said thing causes us to wretch because of the perfidy (I got that word from Byron) we are so fearful of repercussions and being un-faired.
We are now a “neutered species”, neither man nor woman, but somewhere in between, “mules” leaning on either characteristic when it is expedient to do so; becoming women when “being the fairer sex attracts the sympathy of the crowd” (as in big hard back men crying in public over topical issues) or playing that we are big balled men when defending the indefensible (when a man steals another man’s property and does not return it for 8 years in my case or 11 years in that other fellow’s case)
And please do not tell me about the church who now rely on that passage in the Bible “rendering unto caesar that which belongs to Caesar and unto God that which belongs to god, so well as long as Caesar pays our subvention on time …
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