Why Dominican Innovation Keeps Leaving the Country— Insights from Forbes 30 Under 30 Dominican Entrepreneur Stwart Peña Feliz

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor

The Dominican Republic does not lack entrepreneurs.  In fact, I spoke with a Dominican entrepreneur on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List about Dominican entrepreneurship.
We both agree that DR lacks the conditions that allow globally competitive, hard-tech companies to be born locally.

This distinction matters — because it explains why so many of the country’s most capable founders end up building elsewhere, why Dominican venture capital struggles to back industrial-scale innovation, and why the country captures so little of the upside created by its own talent.

To understand this gap, it’s worth examining not a hypothetical startup, but a real Dominican founder operating at the frontier of climate and industrial innovation.

Dominican Talent, Foreign Systems

Stwart Peña Feliz, MIT graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, is the co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle Technologies, a Dominican entrepreneur building an advanced materials company out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. MacroCycle operates in the climate and industrial innovation space — the kind of hard-tech sector policymakers often say they want to attract

What’s notable is not that MacroCycle is based in the United States. It’s that, by Peña Feliz’s own assessment, the company could not have been born in the Dominican Republic at all.

The reason has nothing to do with ambition or intelligence — and everything to do with systems.

What Real Innovation Ecosystems Actually Provide

Peña Feliz credits the MIT ecosystem as the decisive factor in MacroCycle’s early trajectory. Not because of prestige, but because of structure.

MIT offered:

• a safe environment to experiment and fail,
• multiple sources of non-dilutive capital in the form of accelerators and competitions,
• access to mentors who had commercialized deep technologies before,
• and, critically, physical infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale chemical and industrial operations.

These are not perks. They are prerequisites.

In that environment, MacroCycle was able to raise over $600,000 in non-dilutive funding early on, and more than $7 million in capital within its first two years. It could recruit PhDs with domain-specific expertise. It could test, break, and iterate technologies without existential risk at every step.

None of this is standard in emerging innovation systems — including the Dominican Republic.

The Capital Reality Policymakers Avoid

One of the most persistent myths in Dominican innovation discourse is that more incubators, demo days, or startup incentives will produce globally competitive companies.

Hard-tech founders know otherwise.

MacroCycle, Peña Feliz explains, requires roughly $100 million in capital and 6–7 years before reaching profitability. Only after that inflection point does the path toward a potential $10 billion valuation become realistic.

This is not a failure of entrepreneurship. It is the economic reality of industrial and climate innovation.

Dominican venture capital, structured around shorter time horizons and limited risk tolerance, is not designed for this. Banks, constrained by regulatory and balance-sheet realities, are even less so.

Until patient capital exists — or until foreign capital is systematically integrated — hard-tech innovation will continue to be exported.

Infrastructure Beats Incentives Every Time

Governments often try to attract innovation through incentives. Founders follow infrastructure.

In climate and industrial sectors, this means:

• reliable supply chains,
• consistent access to input materials,
• and domestic offtake markets for finished products.

MacroCycle’s work depends on the availability of plastic and textile waste at scale, and on local demand for recycled materials. In ecosystems where collection systems and industrial buyers already exist, barriers are lower. Where they don’t, companies start elsewhere — and only consider expansion later.

This has direct relevance for the Dominican Republic.

Initiatives around waste management, sargassum mitigation, energy transition, and industrial recycling are often discussed independently. But without integrated supply-and-offtake planning, they do not form an innovation platform. They remain projects, not ecosystems.

Innovation follows supply chains, not press releases.

The Dominican Diaspora Corridor — With Conditions

Much has been said about leveraging the Dominican diaspora to strengthen local innovation. Peña Feliz is pragmatic about this idea.

Stronger pathways between diaspora founders and institutions back home can help — but only if domestic institutions have real capacity to contribute.

Universities must be conducting relevant research. Students must be trained in applicable technical and commercial disciplines. Financial institutions must understand venture risk. Without this, collaboration becomes symbolic rather than productive.

The implication is uncomfortable but necessary: attracting diaspora talent is not a marketing exercise. It is a systems upgrade.

Where Startups Actually Break: Operations

One of the least discussed constraints in Dominican entrepreneurship is operational depth.

According to Peña Feliz, early-stage startups rarely fail because of ideas or even revenue models. They fail because they cannot access operators who have scaled complex technologies before.

Execution — not ideation — is the bottleneck.

This insight matters beyond MacroCycle. Innovation ecosystems that lack operational experience cannot compound learning. Each startup starts from zero. Each mistake is relearned. Progress remains episodic rather than systemic.

What This Means for Dominican Innovation

The lesson from MacroCycle is not that Dominican founders must leave to succeed.

It is that innovation is infrastructure.

Capital, talent density, operational experience, physical facilities, and institutional coordination must exist together — or not at all. Without them, Dominican startups will continue to scale abroad, Dominican venture capital will remain conservative, and exportable intellectual property will be monetized elsewhere.

The country’s challenge is not to stop this pattern through rhetoric, but to redesign the system that produces it.

Until then, Dominican innovation will keep leaving the country — not because it wants to, but because it has to.

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Jonathan Joel Mentor is the CEO of Successment and architect of the Digital Nomad Summit™, scaling startups and challenging institutions to evolve. UN World Summit Award Nominee  & ADOEXPO National Excellence in Exportation Award Winner  www.jonathanjmentor.co | digitalnomadsummit.co