Reinvent
 31 Jan. 2008

.
Tucked away in the 50-hectare Science and Technology complex in Taguig, Rizal is an unpretentious office from which some of the brightest ideas in Filipino business inventions and enterprise originate.

The Technology Application and Promotion Institute, or TAPI, is home to the country’s leading and aspiring inventors, by virtue of its mandate under RA 7459. And as administrators of the Inventions Development Assistance Fund and Invention Guarantee Fund.

Yesterday, I was at TAPI’s 21st Anniversary (somebody said it was the 23rd) and it was an occasion to hobnob with our inventors, and their TAPI partners.

Secretary Estrella F. Alabastro of the Department of Science and Technology, a favorite colleague from the Cabinet, set the tone of the celebration with a challenge to TAPI to go beyond assisting inventors and technology innovators, and to reinvent itself to face up to the changes in the market, in its mandate, and in the environment.

Of course, TAPI has already been reinventing itself, since the time of Former Secretary Ceferino Follosco, impishly described by TAPI acting head Undersecretary Maripaz L. Perez as Secretary Saddam, a Russian and Argentinean (Sadami ng trabaho, lahat ay Rush Yan at Urgent Yan) and thus has kept indigenous technology instep and ahead of global trends.

Last year, for instance, was a banner year for TAPI.

TAPI’s Consultancy for Agricultural Productivity Enhancement or CAPE program, covered 145 farms in five CAPE nodes. MPEX or the Manufacturing Productivity Extension Program covered six nodes in four clusters, serving 263 firms. The DOST Academe Technology-Based Enterprise Development Program or DATBED, in tandem with the Small and Medium Enterprise Technology Upgrading Program or SET-UP, has set our youth, in school and out, on the road to entrepreneurship,

The S&T Experts Volunteer Pool Program of TAPI spread the gospel of science and technology to the countryside, where its impact is optimal, even while their prototype development and pilot plant assistance programs, make commercialization of new technologies feasible in the shortest possible time.

With TAPI creating economic value from the commercialization of inventions, researchers and innovators in and out of the academe have the incentive to go on inventing.

For some of the new products, it is just a matter of time before they become commercial successes. For instance, in this time of keen concern for the environment and the dwindling fossil fuel stocks, extraction of bio-ethanol from the water lily, which clogs and chokes the Pasig river, holds the promise of commercial success. This was developed by a high school student in Quezon City.

At a time when everything is available, pre-paid, especially in telecommunications, another student has invented an electric meter using prepaid cards.

Best of all, a couple from Sucat, Parañaque, has concocted a "beer filled with multi-vitamin," and called it "vitamin beer."

As I surveyed the new products and inventions on display at the TAPI center, I got a representative sampling of pastries, handicrafts, even bottled tuba, or Leyte coconut wine, from all over the country.

I tried one invention on display, the Twister or waist trimmer, a stationary exerciser for waist trimming and abdominal muscle development.

Heedful of Secretary Alabastro’s call to reinvent, I invested P2,700 in the contraption, in the hope of reinventing my waistline.

[TOP] [HOME]