Ho Chi Minh City has approved plans to develop 1,000 start-ups as part of its efforts to become a leading start-up hub in South-East Asia over the next five years.
The plan envisages enabling 3,000 businesses to improve their innovation capacity and help 100 access venture capital by 2025.
To achieve the targets, the city will develop infrastructure and an eco-system that would enable start-ups to improve productivity and competitiveness and develop higher-quality products in order to go regional and, later, global.
In 2016-2020, it helped 650-700 businesses annually with improving their innovation capacity.
Last year, Vietnam jumped 13 positions to rank 59th out of 100 economies with the best start-up ecosystems in the world, according to a ranking by StartupBlink, a global start-up ecosystem map and research centre.
Robert Tran, CEO of consulting firm RBNC for North America and Asia-Pacific, said Vietnam had great potential to become a start-up hub in South-East Asia due to a number of “good entrepreneurship ideas” that could be expanded regionally and even globally.
The country also has a population large enough for start-ups to experiment locally first before reaching out to the world, he said.
However, he said the success rate of start-ups was only around 3% as many of them were not able to clearly identify their business goals.
He added that the government should put in place a comprehensive legal framework to ensure protection for investors and assistance and support for start-ups.
In 2016, the government approved a plan to build a start-up ecosystem for innovative and sustainable development of entrepreneurship by 2025.
In February this year, it decided to build a network of innovation centres in Hanoi, Danang and Ho Chi Minh City to support research and development by start-ups.
It wants to make the national start-up ecosystem the 15th best in the Asia-Pacific in the near future.
Currently, the city accounts for more than 50% of the country’s start-ups. — Vietnam News/ANN
