The Million-Dollar Meeting that never happens

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor

The Dominican Republic doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has a procurement problem.

A minister stands beside a group of young entrepreneurs. A bank executive congratulates the winner of a startup competition. University students present prototypes beneath the glow of an LED screen. A corporate group announces an accelerator, a hackathon or a challenge designed to discover the next generation of Dominican solutions.

The rooms are usually full. The intentions are usually sincere. The photographs travel quickly across newspapers and LinkedIn.Then the lights come down, the banners are removed and everyone returns to work. Months later, one question is rarely asked:

Which of those companies received a purchase order?

Not another certificate. Not an invitation to pitch again. Not a memorandum of understanding announcing future cooperation. Not an indefinite pilot performed in exchange for visibility. A contract.

The difficulty of finding that number reveals something more important than a communications gap. It points to a structural weakness in the country’s innovation economy. The Dominican Republic has invested considerable energy in producing innovators. It has paid far less attention to redesigning the institutions expected to buy from them.

That is why the country can simultaneously produce more entrepreneurship programs, innovation competitions and accelerator cohorts while still struggling to create the commercial contracts that transform promising ventures into durable companies. The problem is not simply that startups need more support.

The problem is that too few institutions possess a reliable mechanism for converting an operational problem into a funded mandate, a paid validation and, ultimately, a procurement decision.

The number nobody publishes

Innovation ecosystems have become proficient at counting activity. They count entrepreneurs trained, applications received, workshops delivered, mentors recruited, pitch competitions conducted and ventures accelerated. These figures demonstrate that programs occurred and participants were reached. They do not establish that a market was created.

The missing indicators are more demanding. How many participating companies became approved suppliers? How many paid pilots were commissioned? How many pilots converted into recurring contracts? How much institutional expenditure reached emerging Dominican companies? How much revenue, employment or intellectual property resulted from those transactions?

An innovation initiative that trains 500 entrepreneurs and produces no commercial demand may still have educational value. It should not automatically be described as an economic-development success. We would never measure the tourism industry by counting hotel-management seminars while ignoring occupancy. We would not judge export performance by the number of companies attending trade workshops while ignoring purchase orders.

Yet innovation programs are routinely celebrated without disclosing whether anyone purchased the innovation. This matters because procurement is not an obscure administrative function. It is one of the largest economic forces in modern markets. Public procurement has historically represented roughly 12% of gross domestic product across OECD economies, while broader global estimates place it near 15% of world GDP. In the European Union, public purchasing represents approximately 14% to 15% of GDP.

At that scale, procurement is not merely paperwork performed after strategy has been decided. Procurement is strategy expressed through expenditure.

The cost of not buying

The failure to procure innovation is usually framed as a problem for startups. That framing is incomplete. The institution also pays.

A bank continues operating an inefficient process that could have been automated. A tourism company keeps purchasing foreign technology that was not designed for its operating environment. A ministry loses staff hours to fragmented systems. A university sits on research that never becomes a commercial application. A telecommunications company possesses valuable data but lacks the mechanism to convert it into a new service.

The founder loses a contract. The institution continues paying for the unresolved problem.

Sometimes the cost appears in the operating budget. Sometimes it appears as slower service, duplicated labor, cybersecurity exposure, abandoned data, foreign dependence or delayed decision-making. Because those losses are distributed across departments, they rarely arrive with a single invoice marked “failure to innovate.”

They are nevertheless real.

The Inter-American Development Bank has estimated that inefficiencies in public spending across Latin America and the Caribbean—including weaknesses in procurement, transfers and public payrolls—have been equivalent to approximately 4.4% of regional GDP. Not all of that waste can be solved through technology or emerging suppliers. But the figure establishes the magnitude of the institutional value lost when expenditure systems fail to connect money with better outcomes.

The commercial question, therefore, is not whether institutions should “support startups.”

It is whether they can identify expensive problems, expose them to capable suppliers and purchase better solutions under controlled terms.

Procurement was designed for certainty

It would be easy—and strategically lazy—to blame procurement departments.

Traditional procurement is generally designed to acquire known goods and services from suppliers whose capacity can be demonstrated through prior contracts, financial history, certifications and established delivery records. Its job is to protect the institution from unnecessary risk, preserve competition and obtain value for money.

Innovation introduces a different transaction.

The solution may not have years of operating history. The buyer may understand the problem without knowing the correct technical specification. The supplier may be capable but young. The institution may need to test performance before committing to broader deployment.

Using a conventional purchasing process for that transaction can produce an institutional contradiction: the organization asks for innovation while its qualification criteria reward only what has already been proven elsewhere.

The result is predictable. Large incumbents remain eligible, emerging firms remain interesting, and the innovation program operates at a polite distance from the institution’s actual purchasing machinery.

Mature procurement systems increasingly recognize this distinction. The OECD and European Commission have developed extensive guidance on using public purchasing as a demand-side innovation instrument. European frameworks include pre-commercial procurement, public procurement of innovative solutions and innovation partnerships designed to help institutions define challenges, test competing approaches and move toward implementation while protecting competition and managing risk.

The World Bank’s procurement framework similarly emphasizes that purchasing strategies should be fit for purpose and evaluated according to overall value—not reduced automatically to the lowest compliant price.

These models do not eliminate controls. They redesign the pathway so that uncertainty can be managed rather than used as a reason to avoid the transaction entirely.

The Dominican Republic does not need weaker procurement. It needs more sophisticated procurement.

The million-dollar meeting

Most institutional innovation projects pass easily through their first meeting.

The founder demonstrates the product. The innovation team recognizes its potential. Executives ask intelligent questions. Everyone agrees that the solution deserves further exploration.

The second meeting is more difficult.

That meeting requires the executive who owns the operational problem, the person who controls the budget, procurement, finance, legal, risk, compliance and an institutional sponsor with enough authority to align them.

This is the million-dollar meeting that never happens.

Without it, the first conversation produces interest but no commercial pathway. The innovation team may continue advocating for the solution, but it cannot allocate the business unit’s budget. Procurement may be willing to conduct a process, but it has not received an approved mandate. Legal can review an agreement, but it cannot determine whether solving the problem is strategically important.

Everyone is involved. Nobody owns conversion. That missing ownership is the hidden institutional gap.

The relevant question is not simply whether an organization has a department of innovation. It is whether the organization has designed a route through which innovation can become expenditure, implementation and measurable return.

A pilot is not a commercial strategy

The word “pilot” often enters the conversation when an institution wants to proceed without making a final commitment.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A disciplined pilot can reduce technical, operational and financial uncertainty before wider deployment. But a pilot without a predetermined decision process is not innovation procurement. It is postponed judgment.

Before a pilot begins, the institution should be able to answer six questions:

• What expensive problem is being solved?
• Which executive owns that problem?
• Which budget can pay for the solution?
• What evidence will constitute successful validation?
• Which procurement mechanism can follow success?
• Who has authority to approve scale?

If these questions remain unanswered, the pilot is likely to become an isolated experiment. The startup provides customization, training, access to its technology and executive attention. The institution gains intelligence and optionality. Then the budget cycle changes, the internal sponsor moves, or the project disappears into an indefinite review.

A paid validation should be designed as a bridge to a decision—not as a substitute for one.

From innovation programs to innovation markets

For a bank, ministry, tourism group, telecommunications company, university or development institution, the first step is not necessarily announcing another competition.

It is identifying the operational problems already consuming money, time or institutional capacity and deciding which of them can be opened to qualified external solutions.

From there, six elements must be connected:

Problem → Sponsor → Budget → Validation → Procurement → Scale

The problem must be economically material. The sponsor must possess institutional authority. The budget must be identified before the solution is celebrated. Validation must be paid, time-bound and governed by agreed success criteria. Procurement must have a legally and operationally viable route. Scale must follow a defined decision rather than another round of exploratory meetings.

This architecture protects institutions as much as suppliers.

It prevents innovation teams from promoting solutions that business units do not need. It prevents startups from entering pilots that have no buyer. It allows procurement and legal teams to shape the transaction before enthusiasm outruns institutional reality. It gives finance a basis for measuring operational return. It allows executives to distinguish innovation activity from commercial implementation.

Most importantly, it turns innovation from a communications program into a management discipline.

The first sophisticated customer

The strongest innovation economies did not emerge from venture capital alone.

Investment matters, but capital cannot substitute indefinitely for customers. Many technologies that later reshaped global markets benefited from sophisticated institutional demand during their formative years. Governments and large corporations did not merely applaud new capabilities; they became early buyers, established performance requirements and gave companies the reference implementations needed to reach broader markets.

The United States’ Small Business Innovation Research program is one prominent example of public demand being used to develop and test solutions for federal agencies. European governments have built formal innovation-procurement instruments. Countries such as South Korea have integrated public purchasing through sophisticated digital procurement infrastructure, while the European Union is now debating how procurement can strengthen strategic industries and reduce dependence on external providers.

The lesson is not that the Dominican state should indiscriminately favor young companies or lower standards in the name of entrepreneurship.

The state should not pick winners. Nor should banks and corporations purchase weak products as charity.

The lesson is that sophisticated economies create controlled opportunities for qualified emerging suppliers to prove whether they can solve important problems. They do not confuse risk management with the automatic exclusion of anything new.

A demanding first customer can do more for a company than a dozen workshops. It creates revenue, operating evidence, credibility and a reference case that can travel beyond the Dominican market.

For a small economy seeking to export more intellectual property, that distinction is decisive.

Measure contracts, not applause

The Dominican Republic has no shortage of innovation language.

It has talent, universities, corporate balance sheets, public institutions, financial infrastructure and an increasingly ambitious entrepreneurial class. What remains underdeveloped is the commercial machinery connecting those assets. A mature national innovation report should therefore disclose more than the number of entrepreneurs reached.

It should report the value of innovation contracts awarded, the number of first-time suppliers qualified, the percentage of paid validations converted into contracts, the institutional savings or revenue generated, and the number of Dominican implementations subsequently exported.

Those figures would reveal whether we are producing activity or capability.

The next phase of Dominican innovation will not be determined by how many founders enter a program, how many judges attend a demonstration day or how many institutions appear beneath the logo wall. It will be determined by whether the country’s institutions can place budgets behind defined problems and allow qualified companies to compete for the right to solve them.

The Dominican Republic has spent years building the supply of innovation. Now it must learn to engineer demand. Because innovation does not become economic power when it receives applause. It becomes economic power when somebody with authority signs the purchase order.

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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