Clarke

A business often begins as a dream. Silburn Clarke went through a number of them before landing on the right one.

Clarke is the president/CEO of Spatial Innovision, which provides Geographic Information System (GIS) services and Global Positioning System (GPS) solutions for the Caribbean.

He worked with the Government for 21 years and during this period he experimented with his own ventures. First it was a consultancy firm which integrated geography and technology; then it was honey production, followed by a geographical mapping firm. They were all unsuccessful.

Opportunity

But, for the man who grew up in Allman Town, Kingston, and was trained in land surveying, knowledge would soon meet opportunity.

In 1997, the company, Fujitsu ICL, wanted to return to its core business and ceased offering services.

"They were trying geographic information systems as one of their service offerings so they were divesting themselves of all their services," he said. Clarke jumped at the chance. Spatial Innovision was initially started along with Ken Sylvester, CEO of Fujitsu at the time, and Thomas Donaldson.

It came with its own challenges.

"The challenge was a lack of awareness of exactly what this thing was all about and also there was some amount of apprehension to embrace some of these new ideas," he said. So, the groundwork had to be done, selling companies and government agencies their products. Clarke said people have caught on. When they introduced the virtual reference systems which helps to increase the accuracy of GPS readings about five years ago, it took some convincing.

Technology growing

"Now we can report that we implemented it in Trinidad in 2005, across the entire country, and we're just wrapping up an implementation in Jamaica. We won a bid to do a similar thing in St Lucia. So we moved from a position where nobody in the Caribbean knew of GPS, we introduced the concept and then slowly, with knowledge and awareness, the technology is growing," Clarke explained.

Clarke credits his background for the business mind he has developed. The entrepreneurial spirit was alive in his mother who was a shop owner/rental agent; his biological father was a scientist who played an integral role in introducing poultry farming in Jamaica and one of his grandmother's was a higgler.

His alma mater, Kingston College (KC), also played a role.

"KC itself has a very strong, can do, you can conquer the world, there is nobody better than you kind of spirit, so that helped," he said.

Today, Spatial Innovision has gained recognition from its partners, the industry and clients in the form of numerous awards, the most recent being the Pioneers for Prosperity Country Award. Along with the award was a US$40,000 grant from the Inter-American Development Bank.

"One of the things that I want to do is share our experience with other entrepreneurs to encourage others to take on this calling," he said.

One of the things which got them noticed was their four-pronged business model, KCED, an acronym for knowledge, culture, entrepeneurship and development.

Clarke explained that culture represents the company's beliefs which would in turn determine its outlook on knowledge. Knowledge is all the ideas whether explicit or tacit. That information then forms a stock which allows the entrepeneurship attitude to be leveraged to create value for customers and grow their businesses. The growth of the business should, in turn, lead to development of employees and the business.