UB President Proposes Tri-Sector Business Model to Foster Innovation
22nd January 2023
Dr. Erik Rolland, President, University of the Bahamas
A triple-pronged collaboration where self-interests are aligned to drive innovation is what President and CEO of University of The Bahamas (UB) Dr. Erik Rolland has proposed as a transformative approach for the hospitality and tourism sector to flourish.
Dr. Rolland, who assumed the leadership of UB in August 2022, shared this idea during his recent presentation on Hospitality and Tourism Education at the 32nd Annual Bahamas Business Outlook (BBO) held on Thursday 19th January. This year’s BBO was held in honour of the impending 50th anniversary of Bahamian independence.
President Rolland proposed Tri-Sector Innovation as a business model for the Bahamian context with government and quasi-governmental operations working strategically and seamlessly with education and private sector partners to bring about transformation.
“With this kind of approach, you are paying attention to the three P’s: people, planet and prosperity because if we don’t manage all of these, we have no future,” noted Dr. Rolland.
“We are doing this at some level in The Bahamas, but we have to choose the right resources and we have to understand and align the self-interest of the organizations involved. We have company resources or private organization resources, nonprofit resources, government resources and quasi government institutions like UB working together along the lines of their own self. But if you can coordinate the fulfillment of those individual missions, you can create a tri-sector business model,” he explained.
Dr. Rolland added that UB’s work requires this kind of collaboration. He also called for a focus on academic programmes to bolster innovative and educational tourism, creating others delivered through hybrid and virtual modalities and sustaining synergies with hospitality and stakeholder partners based in the tri-sector innovation strategy.
“So this is one model for innovation that the university will promote strongly [as] we are building [academic] programmes in areas addressing the needs and national development of The Bahamas. We can’t do it alone,” he said.
UB’s College of Tourism, Hospitality, Culinary Arts and Leisure Management (THe CALM) has a rich legacy of producing world-class graduates who have helped to drive growth and innovation in the industry nationally and internationally. THe CALM was originally the Bahamas Hotel Training College (BHTC) in the 1970’s but in 2000 was amalgamated with the then College of The Bahamas.
In addition to the programmes it offers, THe CALM is on a mission to make its collaborations and synergies with industry stakeholders more robust and sustainable. Its graduates are leaders at hospitality and tourism operations around the country and the world. Culinary teams of faculty and students have won prestigious competitions and are leading talents in hospitality and tourism sector. Still, there is more left to do as the industry evolves.
“Here in The Bahamas, we are uniquely positioned to deliver to the world an educational tourism market and… that alone is expected to go from about $400 million in 2021 to almost $2 billion in 2030 and that is an incredible opportunity. It taps into everything,” President Rolland said.
Dr. Rolland also shared that along with changes in the management of the global workforce as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunities are expanding to capitalize on domestic remote work and international remote work. He urged a deeper focus on this growing market along with heightened innovations in eco-tourism and educational tourism which has the capacity for further collaborations involving non-profit and non-governmental organizations.
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Chartered on 10th November 2016, University of The Bahamas (UB) is a beacon for national transformation. Approximately 5,000 students are enrolled in the University of The Bahamas system which includes campuses and centres on New Providence, Grand Bahama, San Salvador and Abaco, as well as UB online education. UB’s diverse academic programmes, research engagements, athletics and leadership development experiences equip our students to become global citizens in a dynamic world.