My MBA students and I had a bit of discussion last night about research and development activities in the country, and why we do not have an “R&D culture” here. Is it because we’re a developing country?

Well, yes, the fact that we’re a developing country does count as a factor. We simply do not have the budget for investing in R&D activities. In fact, most patents that you will see filed in our Patents Office come from the pharma giants here. Not much in terms of new patents from our other enterprises.

We also have to factor in the fact that most of the businesses here are SMEs, which means that they are mostly in the process of ensuring that they survive for the long haul. Therefore, there’s not much funds that they can “sacrifice” for research and development activities.

But having said all that, we do have to distinguish between R&D and innovation. R&D requires investments. But innovation per se need not imply having to invest precious funds. In fact, all you need is the ability to think creatively and innovatively.

And Filipinos can be great innovators, given enough motivation to do so. Many may bewail the lack of innovations in Philippine business enterprises, but that is simply because there hasn’t been much motivation for us to do so. At least not yet.

But turn your heads towards one of our most aggressively competitive industries, namely telecoms, and you will see signs of just how innovative we can be… given sufficient competitive motivation to do so. Our telecom giants have become amazing innovators in the fields of online transactions, to the point that SMART’s software technologies have been exported to telecom firms abroad. That’s how aggressively innovative we can be.

But again, we just need the inspiration and the motivation to be innovative. Once any given local industry starts getting extremely competitive, you can bet that Filipinos here are going to start getting extremely creative, whether or not R&D is in their budgets.