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Profile of
Lisa Cummins Executive Director, UWI Consulting
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rudging through the vanilla fields of Uganda, getting mud between her toes, Lisa Cummins was not only exploring ways of adding value to the East African nation’s agri-sector, she was perhaps also finding her way back to her native Barbados, and then on to the University of the West Indies. Cummins was then the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Trade Adviser to Uganda and East Africa. And it was her breadth of international experience in trade and diplomacy that must have made her seem like the right fit to take over as Executive Director of the UWI Consulting Company, where she will attempt to build bridges between the university, the private sector and regional governments. She has been on the job since March, just enough time to assess UWI Consulting Company’s capacity and set her own priorities. Based on lessons learnt as head of the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries, she knew what she didn’t want to do, which was rush in with a well thought-out 120-day plan that proved difficult to implement because of structural shortcomings. “I came into the University with the mindset that I had to diagnose where I was first, so I didn’t have that push and pull factor all the time. So I allocated the first three months in this instance, rather than the previous occasion, to diagnosing rather than acting,” she says candidly. STAN MAY - JUNE 2016
In a phone interview from Barbados (she’s yet to visit the St. Augustine campus, but plans to soon) Cummins said her initial challenge was figuring out how to take an eightyear-old organization apart and put it back together “in the best way.” Now she needs university sign-off before restructuring can begin with the important task of securing buyin from university partners. Those partners are the researchers and lecturers who have knowledge to offer to the region’s governments and businesses, on everything from enhancing food security to promoting exports. “We know that there’s a difference between research for academia and research for industry,” admits Cummins. “One of the criticisms that is often leveled at the University is it’s not necessarily an applied solution that we are providing, that it’s too theoretical. We are going to be blending the best of academia with industry to be able to provide a theoretical basis for an applied solution.” UWI Consulting also intends to help its partners access the financing to realize their plans. If the consultancy sounds like a money-making enterprise, that’s because it is. And unabashedly so. Cummins has already identified “a major deficiency” of its set-up: “There is no shareholder or revenue type relationship between University Consulting and the departments or lecturers in UWI.”