Nigel Tutt Chief Executive of Priority One

A few weeks ago Priority One launched the Young Innovator Awards for 2022. In its 12^th year, YiA! is an innovation programme for intermediate and secondary school students to work on an innovative idea they have – we've had some fantastic results over the years solving a broad range of problems. Long-term partners of YiA! are Bluelab, Cucumber and Woods Agency – all outstanding local innovators in their areas of business. The contributions of their staff, who are practising real-life innovation on a daily basis, are invaluable to our students undertaking the programme.

Innovation capability

Programmes like YiA! help us to build innovation capability in our youth. This is important in two ways. Firstly, we want them to have the skills to participate in the modern workplace. This involves creativity, empathy, problem solving and communication – skills that are not necessarily taught in our traditional education system. Secondly, it is really important that we develop higher skills for our economy in the long term.

Higher skills

Higher skills are important because the Western BOP economy has a weak point in earnings. While almost all other economic statistics are firmly in our favour, our earnings are below the national average. Low earnings leads to problems around affordability and standard of living and is something that we must correct for the future wellbeing of our community. We also know many other countries are investing heavily in this area.

The path to fixing our low income levels involves creating, encouraging and growing higher value companies that create higher value, knowledge-intensive jobs. We then need to get as many of our own community taking those jobs, which is why we need people with the skills to participate in the modern workforce. Young Innovator Awards is one of a number of initiatives that contribute to achieving that goal.

Good progress

Fortunately, we're making good progress to correct the imbalance around incomes; we have some great local companies helping to create more value in our economy as they build their businesses. This ranges from tech start-ups, to our advanced manufacturing industry, to a strong export sector – all of which create valuable, highly-skilled jobs. The more we can build these companies and the jobs they create, the better of we will be as a community in the future.