News: Innovation key to sustainable growth: seminar
Name of the Newspaper: Daily Times
Date of publication: Tuesday, March 28, 2006

LAHORE: Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub Khan has said the government is focusing on innovation and competitiveness to ensure sustainable economic growth.

He said that the emerging market economies had already adopted the strategy of innovation and competitiveness.

He was speaking at a seminar on "Competitiveness and Economic Growth" at the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Monday. LCCI President Mian Shafqat Ali, Senior Vice President Abdul Basit, Prof Michael Enright, member of the Competitiveness Institute (TCI), Board of Advisors and Director of Competitiveness Programme, Hong Kong Institute for Economic and Business Strategy and Arthur Bayhan, Vice President of TCI and CEO of the Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF), also spoke.

The minister said the government had established a Competitive Support Fund (CSF) in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a platform for innovation and competitiveness in Pakistan. He added that the objective of the CSF was to catch up with the progress made in various countries on innovation and competitiveness to propel economic growth, enhance the quality of production and create better employment opportunities for youth in the future in Pakistan.

"The CSF through its financial facilities will develop appropriate instruments to upgrade the competitiveness of the economy and promote overall competitiveness in Pakistan, which will boost the economic growth and create better employment," the minister said.

Mr Omar said Pakistan now faced an urgent need to ensure the competitiveness of its enterprises and services and to promote innovation to strengthen its economy, which is productive and create conditions for the economic well-being of its citizens. "Pakistan needs to strengthen the conditions and institutions that will allow the national economy and society to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the newly-risen global knowledge-based competitive economy."

Explaining working of the CSF, the minister said the programme would use one of its financial facilities to promote knowledge-based enterprises.

Prof Michael Enright said Pakistan had a lot of potential to further improve its competitiveness. Highlighting the objectives of CSF and the conference planned in May, he said the CSF had three financial windows namely Matchmaking Grants, Technical Assistance, and Business Incubators and Venture Capital.

Mr Enright, who is one of the founding fathers of competitiveness, presented the economic development and competitiveness of a Chinese economy.

LCCI President Mian Shafqat Ali said that at this juncture of history the biggest challenge before the policy-makers and the business community is how to keep the momentum of growth going and remain competitive. He said the competitiveness requires commitment to learn new technologies and to change according to the requirement of customers. Modern-day business organizations must have facilitating structure to learn and adopt new innovations. Top managements need to understand that only those organizations survive in an environment of tough competition that support their team members to think and provide opportunities to learn. More importantly, business managements that have enough trust in their employees that they are allowed to experiment more mistakes, take more risks are the organizations of future.

LCCI Senior Vice President Abdul Basit, throwing light on the subject, said that the organization that have strong research and development department are more fit to survive in the complex competition of large markets. With trade liberalization, the impact of free market economy is bound to bring extinction to organizations that are inefficient, ineffective and have poor productivity standards.