14/04/2026
Let’s face it, the Caribbean is certainly not short on entrepreneurship activity.
If anything, we’ve scaled it.
From incubation and acceleration programmes to startup competitions, entrepreneurship training and grant calls. ❤️
On the surface, it looks like progress.
But the underbelly of all that activity, reveals the outcomes which tell a different story.
Most businesses
start small,
stay small,
and never become investible or bankable.
So we have to ask a harder question:
What exactly is the system designed to produce?
Because right now, it rewards:
participation over performance, visibility over viability and activity over actual conversion
We contend that once a system is designed that way, it will continue to produce exactly what we are seeing.
After more almost 20 years supporting entrepreneurs within the Caribbean startup and innovation ecosystem, we can say this with confidence:
Adding more programmes will not fix the problem.
It will compound it.
As more conversations begin to emerge around “new approaches” to ecosystem building, the real risk is this:
We end up recreating the same system, with better branding and louder voices.
As we see it, the issue has never been effort. We got lots of that! It has always been design. And until we redesign for outcomes, we will continue to industrialise activity instead of producing companies.
This is a big reason why we took a hard look at exactly what TEN Habitat has been doing and decided to evolve. To move beyond programmes and into system design.
As the founder of TEN Habitat I am really happy to say that we are now identifying a small number of:
institutional partners
ecosystem collaborators
and serious founders
who understand that what comes next requires more than incremental change—It requires a shift!
If that’s you, let’s talk.
