Guyana’s innovation future depends on choices we are not yet making

May 10, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA AA

(Kaieteur News) – It is an uncomfortable headline to write, and a more uncomfortable one to defend. Guyana is the fastest growing economy in the Western Hemisphere. Capital is flowing. Construction cranes dot the Georgetown skyline. The country has a young population, a globally distributed diaspora, and a national budget beyond anything previous generations could have imagined.

By every visible measure, this should be a country in the early stages of an innovation surge. And yet by the measure…

Shallowness produces a second problem. In larger markets, an innovator can capture meaningful sales volume before imitators catch up, earning enough to recover investment, fund the next round of innovation, and build a firm. In small, highly concentrated markets, this almost never happens. Before a Guyanese innovator can scale, established firms with deeper pockets, political connections, and distribution networks can absorb the idea, launch their own versions, and crowd the originator out.

Many Guyanese innovators know this pattern. You spend years developing a product. You seek investment or a partnership. Within a year, a version appears under a logo you do not own, marketed by people you did not authorise, sold through channels you could not access. The originator is left with a depleted savings account. The incumbent gains another product line. This is not always theft in a legal sense—though sometimes it is—but the predictable outcome of a market where the institutions that would protect originators have not been built, and the firms that benefit from their absence have no incentive to build them.

The American legal scholar Jonathan Barnett documents this mechanism in his 2021 book Innovators, Firms, and Markets. In environments like Guyana’s, without functioning intellectual property enforcement, only large vertically integrated firms can protect their ideas through scale, distribution control, and political influence. Small inventors, lacking those advantages, are systematically captured. Strong IP enforcement, accessible to small inventors, is what levels the playing field.

Guyana does not have that. There is no dedicated intellectual property office. IP functions are handled as a registry within the Deeds and Commercial Registries Authority under the Ministry of Legal Affairs, governed by a Patents and Designs Act from 2002 and a Trade Marks Act largely inherited from colonial statute. Processing times for a national patent run to roughly three years. Guyana is not a signatory to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the main framework for cross‑border patent filing.

In April 2024, the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally engaged the Attorney General because Guyana’s outdated IP laws were assessed to be disincentivising investment, and offered technical assistance for reform. The Attorney General publicly acknowledged that modernisation of the commercial architecture is a priority. Two years later, the modernisation has not arrived. As theory predicts, originators lose and imitators with scale and access win. Rational young people conclude that investing their best years in originating ideas at home is a poor bet.

A third structural force compounds these problems. Economists David de la Croix and Frédéric Docquier, in a 2014 paper on small island developing states, show that smallness itself drives skilled emigration. Independent of other factors, being small pushes talent out. Brain drain in such states averages about 50 percent of the high‑skilled labour force and exceeds 75 percent in extreme cases like Guyana.

Their model shows that small states face two possible equilibria. In the good equilibrium, skilled workers stay, innovation accumulates, productivity rises, and wages climb. In the bad equilibrium, skilled workers leave, innovation collapses, productivity stagnates, and wages decline. Small states are more likely than large ones to settle into the bad equilibrium, and the cost of being stuck there can exceed 100 percent of observed GDP per capita. That is not a marginal loss. It is everything the country could have been.

The Guyanese data match this picture. Roughly 39 percent of all Guyanese citizens live abroad, and about half of all Guyanese with tertiary education have emigrated to the United States alone. The people who might have built the next generation of Guyanese firms, founded the venture capital architecture, run the Competition Commission, or demanded better procurement transparency are not here to do those things. They are in Toronto, Brooklyn, London, and Houston, doing them for other countries. Every wave of emigration makes the next wave more likely, as the friends and mentors who might have anchored young talent at home are themselves abroad. This is the bad equilibrium in motion.

These structural forces are not a mystery to the global research community. The Startup Genome research firm, which produces authoritative rankings of startup ecosystems, recently released a dedicated analysis of the Caribbean. Across the entire region, including Guyana, it identified only 154 validated technology startups. All Caribbean ecosystems sit at the earliest developmental stage the methodology measures. The constraints are shared: limited access to capital, limited mentorship, and limited policy support.

Guyana has no equivalent of the United States National Science Foundation, which deploys about US$9 billion annually to fund research the private sector will not. There is no meaningful venture capital architecture. Innovation hubs lack sustained public funding. University research budgets do not meaningfully drive private-sector deal flow. Public procurement does not systematically favour Guyanese-owned innovators over foreign incumbents. The infrastructure that would translate Guyanese ideas into Guyanese firms does not exist, and current policy shows little sign of building it.

This is the diagnosis, and it is harsh. The domestic market is too small to reward innovation. Incumbent firms can capture most innovations they do not originate. IP enforcement does not protect originators. Skilled young people have rational reasons to emigrate before investing in creating anything at all. Venture capital and public research funding architectures are absent. Procurement too often rewards relationships over merit. And political leaders, with rare exceptions, treat innovation as a slogan rather than a serious policy domain. Innovation in Guyana is not doomed because Guyanese citizens are incapable of it. It is blocked because our institutions, by accumulated design and neglect, have made it economically irrational to attempt.

The economic literature on how small economies escape the bad equilibrium is unusually clear about what must change, and several of the levers are within reach if political will exists. The headline of this column asks whether innovation is doomed in Guyana. Doom, however, is a description of present conditions, not a permanent fate. Conditions can be changed. The country has the resources to do so. Whether this becomes a genuine priority for our national leadership remains to be seen.

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• Georgetown skyline, Guyana’s innovation, Karen Abrams, Western Hemisphere

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