7 News Belize

Entrecon Is For Everyone
posted (November 18, 2016)
ENTRECON, is an annual event that brings key stakeholders in the entrepreneurial community to share ideas about how to develop and innovate Belize's business culture. Today, everyone from business owners to academics and even government agencies gathered in Belize City to listen to experts and discuss how information and communication technologies can be used to take business in Belize to the next level. We spoke to Lejia Gideon, the General Manager of Enterprise and Innovation at BELTRAIDE, and David Ahuja, Senior Director of Enterprise Information Management at Walmart, who told us why Belizean entrepreneurs need to put a greater emphasis on technology when growing their businesses.

Lejia Melanie Gideon - General Manager, Enterprise & Innovation, BELTRAIDE
"The goal of today's event is how to use ICT to make business better. How you use ICT to bring that innovative thought to commercialization. That is the theme for today, but overall, BELTRADE along with its other partners, in the last 5 year have systematically been trying to expose, celebrate, expand the consciousness of what is entrepreneurship, why is it important, why do we need more and more players and participants in the field of entrepreneurship. It takes the business idea to a new level. It's all about how do I problem solve something in a very nontraditional way and in that problem solving how do I bring ease to business. So any entrepreneurial venture is all about how not only problem solving but the ease of what it did in problem solving. And not only is entrepreneurship about enterprises, it's about the individuals themselves who think differently. So the entrepreneurial spirit, so as a second annual convention to the country, and we're exceedingly proud, this is a new level, we're hoping that people can appreciate more and more, and when I say people that can be the public, that can be academia, the government entities, that could be various aspects of private sector. How do we celebrate and strengthen entrepreneurship, because that is what makes an economy diverse, viable, and sustainable. So that is the importance of today."

David Ahuja - Senior Director of Enterprise Information Management at Walmart
"This is really, really important and really important for Belize to start to develop that skill. It starts with an education, growing that education and focusing people on technology. I don't know if it's as big a priority in the country, and it needs to be. It absolutely needs to be where every child is getting their hands on a computer at age 5 or younger. And we need to be producing brilliant technologies that I know we can in Belize to be able to have an impact in this digital enterprise."

"I think of it this way, Belize has a population of 350,000. That's big, but that's their market size, 350,000. The market size they wanna go after is about 6 billion people. It's much, much bigger if you start to take your entrepreneurship skill and market it outside the country and that's really where I think we need to go."

ENTRECON is part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, and aims to give Belizeans the tools to use technology to diversify the way they do business.

Home | Archives | Downloads/Podcasts | Advertise | Contact Us

7 News Belize