How Dominican corporations and banks can turn innovation into a new economic export

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor

Every country has a word it uses too casually.
In the Dominican Republic, that word is “innovation.”

Executives invoke it at conferences, policymakers repeat it in speeches, and institutions package it into glossy programs. Yet most of what gets labeled “innovation” in this country is modernization dressed up as transformation, or incremental improvement sold as national strategy.

Meanwhile, the real engines of wealth creation—intellectual property, venture-scale product development, cross-border digital services, corporate-backed R&D—remain almost entirely absent.That gap won’t be fixed by slogans, small grants, or borrowed Silicon Valley aesthetics.

It will be fixed by Dominican corporations.

Because in an economy where the private sector commands the capital, the infrastructure, and the influence, innovation is no longer a national aspiration. It is a corporate obligation.

The Dominican innovation paradox

The same country that hosts millions of digital nomads, attracts global operators, and produces world-class Dominican entrepreneurs continues to underfund the one capability that could anchor its position in the region.

The paradox is painful and simple:
Dominican startups and Dominican diaspora founders innovate abroad because Dominican corporations rarely innovate at home.

Part of this is structural—no formal innovation budgets, no internal frameworks, no mechanisms to track ROI. But the deeper issue is cultural: innovation is treated as an experiment, not an asset class.

Countries that take innovation seriously—Finland, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, the UAE—treat it as infrastructure.  Dominican corporations can replicate that logic without waiting for a legislative miracle.

But it requires understanding what innovation programs are actually for.

Innovation programs exist to do three things—nothing more

They create new revenue, they strengthen strategic defensibility, and they expand a company’s portfolio of capabilities through IP, data or new business models.

Everything else—hackathons, idea contests, photo-op accelerators—is theater.

When Dominican executives tell me they are “doing innovation,” I ask a single question:

 “What percentage of your revenue comes from initiatives less than five years old?”

Most avoid the answer.

Innovation without revenue impact is not innovation.
Innovation without measurable risk reduction is not innovation.
Innovation without new IP is not innovation.

This clarity is what the country lacks—and what Dominican executives must now impose.Why corporate accelerators are the missing architecture

Around the world, the companies that outperform their peers do not wait for the ecosystem to mature—they architect it.   They build corporate accelerators.

A corporate accelerator is not a startup incubator with a press kit. It is a strategic engine that allows a company to test new markets, adopt external innovations, internalize talent, develop proprietary technology, and deploy capital creatively without navigating outdated venture laws.

It gives the corporation startup velocity without startup fragility.

Properly designed, a corporate accelerator becomes the bridge between established Dominican corporations and the Dominican startups, Dominican diaspora founders, and regional innovators who are already building the future elsewhere.

It also solves a national problem: the country desperately needs institutional pathways that convert talent into economic output. Most non-corporate accelerators do admirable community work, but they are not built to carry the weight of an economy. They cannot build exportable IP at scale, they cannot deploy capital at meaningful levels, and they cannot shift banking behavior.

Corporate accelerators can.

The role of banks: the risk architecture no one is talking about

Dominican banks may be conservative, but they are not ignorant. They understand that the region is moving toward credit models built on behavioral data, not paperwork, and that corporate-backed innovation is safer than isolated startup risk.

This is where the real transformation lies: corporations and banks co-designing risk frameworks for innovation.

In advanced markets, the model looks like this:

A large corporation defines the sector thesis it wants to innovate—energy, mobility, retail, logistics, health, tourism, finance.
Local banks provide working-capital facilities tied to the accelerator’s portfolio performance.

Regional banks (Caribbean, Central America, LATAM) open cross-border liquidity windows.

International banks and multilaterals (IDB, IFC, CAF, EIB) co-finance exportable technology, derisked by the corporation’s domain expertise.

This blended structure allows Dominican corporations to innovate without gambling their core business, and it gives banks a hedged, data-rich environment where innovation becomes underwritable instead of speculative.

This is how real economies modernize.  Not through conferences.  Through capital structures.

Why this matters for the country

If Dominican corporations build serious corporate accelerators, three outcomes follow:

1. Dominican startups finally gain institutional pathways to scale.
2. Dominican executives transition from operators to architects of regional innovation.
3. The country stops exporting innovation value and starts compounding it.

This is the difference between a country known for beaches and a country known for breakthroughs.

And it’s the difference between an economy that absorbs talent and an economy that leaks it.

Where Successment fits—quietly but decisively

Successment’s work sits precisely at this intersection of capital, capability, and cross-border execution.   RevOps Science was designed for environments like the Dominican Republic, where corporations aspire to modernity but lack the operational architecture to get there.

Not to “consult” innovation.  To operationalize it.

To build the frameworks, the governance, the metrics, the accelerator engines, and the cross-banking structures that allow innovation to behave like a real asset class.

The Global South deserves institutions built with discipline, not decoration.
And the Dominican Republic—positioned between Latin America, North America, Europe, and a rising digital nomad economy—cannot afford to treat innovation as optional.

The corporations that move first will define how far the country can rise.
Everyone else will be left admiring LinkedIn posts written from somewhere else.

We’ll be continuing this conversation at the Digital Nomad Summit 2026 Santo Domingo.  It will be the perfect opportunity for Dominican private sector leadership, digital nomads, entrepreneurs and global industry leaders to convene and exchange ideas.

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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