HANOI IS ON THE WAY TO BE AN INNOVATIVE CITY…

Written by Doan Lan Hanh (Ms), Nguyen Thi Minh (Ms), Tran Bao Minh (Ms) and supervise by Chu Thi Hai Anh (Ms)

It is no doubt that Hanoi has the strongest infrastructure, many professors – doctors, who contribute the highest ratio in the proportion of national science and technology potential. We can see from below table of comparison between two biggest cities of Vietnam:

Number of Institutions in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, 2019   
    Row LabelsCount of Institution
Hanoi129
Academy30
College33
University66
HCM108
Academy8
College48
University52
Grand Total237

Sources: Ms.Minh – Writer

Besides, in 2019, Hanoi had nearly 5,000 international publications on scientific and technological research, accounting for 40% of the country. From 2016 to 2020, Hanoi has 346 provincial Science &Technology missions which were implemented, including 212 natural science and technology tasks, 84 humanities and social sciences and 50 experimental production projects with a total budget of 633,092 billion VND; more than 85% of research results after acceptance are applied in practice (Source:Labour Magazine, 2020)

Team Cobtain from Hanoi won the first prize in SAGE Global 2020 International Youth Entrepreneurship Contest with the corn-lep recycling project.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/vn/giao-duc/7-hoc-sinh-ha-noi-gianh-giai-vo-dich-cuoc-thi-khoi-nghiep-tre-quoc-te-665783.html

Another key thing to remember, Hanoi is holding the top position in the country for labor productivity. The labor quality has been getting better in recent years, thanks to the high quality and up-to-date training programs in universities as well as other types of training centers.

Right place, right time and right resources – it comes as no surprise that more and more young people decide to start their own businesses in Hanoi. Various contests and events were held in Hanoi in order to provide further support to start-ups and entrepreneurs, such as: Start up Journey 2018, Start-up Hunt 2020, TechFest Vietnam 2020, Creative Designs for Hanoi Spaces 2020-2021, etc. Throughout these events, a lot of new ideas were discovered and implemented in the fields of agriculture, digital technology, architecture… Hanoi youth also actively participated in international contests and obtained remarkable results.

On the other hand, despite having all these favorable conditions, Hanoi is still struggling to unleash its full potential as an innovative city, mostly due to out-of-date policies and slow responsive actions from the regulators. For instance, from Ms. Hai Anh – Cofounder of SpaceShare – a tech startup, they succeeded in calling fund from Japanese investors but had to wait 5 months to receive money into their bank account due to Vietnam’s complicated investment procedures for foreign enterprise. Another example from CIMB Bank Vietnam Limited, in collaboration with Korea’s first Fintech unicorn – TOSS recently launched the product “TOSS card by CIMB”. This is Vietnam’s first ever bank account that can be opened and maintained online, straight from the non-bank app using EKYC. While many perceived this as a true breakthrough in the banking industry, the State Bank of Vietnam was uncertain and raised many doubts before the launch since no regulation exists for this strange partnership concept. CIMBVN was finally given clearance with warnings from the SBV on risk acceptance, however this goes to show somewhat out-of-date Vietnam’s regulations.

With new ideas bustling from every corner of Hanoi, we are hopeful that in the future, policies makers and innovators will share the same vision of making Hanoi the most innovative city.

Source:

  1. https://tuyensinhso.vn/khu-vuc-he-cao-dang/khu-vuc-tp-hcm-c13984.html

My most inspiring teacher: Mr Patrice Bonneau

By Thu Trang Võ

Clock Exercise: Realising what is real value for customers

This article is reserved for my most inspiring teacher: Mr Patrice Bonneau. I first met him in Marketing of Innovation course. With years of working experiences as a consultant of innovative marketing, Patrice has typical characteristics of marketer: Creative, optimistic, talkative, social and outgoing. Although his way of describing things is quite difficult to understand literally, I succeeded in changing my mind towards creativity and applying his method – Semantic Analysis into our project KIDCOM.

We experienced this exercise at our first lesson, in which we imagined that we were Clock Manufacturer. We were ordering R&D to design a new model of clock. Patrick showed us 20 different models of clock and then asked us to choose the most appropriate one for the launching event. Each model appeared in just 3-5 seconds and we had to make decisions immediately!

By Patrice’s facilitating and guiding, we identified 4 main criteria to assess the model: Readable, Precision, Reliable, Fashionable. After that, each of us voted for our choice. Finally, Patrick summed up the results as the table.

Next, he asked us if we were customers, how much we were willing to pay for our chosen model of clock. He showed us the real price later.

Here we discovered the difference between the eyes of an engineer and the eyes of a customer. Engineers focus more on functions, features, quality of the clock while customers choose the clock that they like – base on their emotions. In this case, engineers are standing on the Usable Value’s View. Customers pay more attention to Estimate /Attractive Value of the product.

Who pays for the products and brings money to companies? The answer is clear: Customers. How do customers think this product is valuable while the other is cheap? All is just estimated by customers, not by engineers. 

Without speaking out, Patrice made us understand that when designing a product/service, we should put ourselves in customers’ shoe to think what is really value to them. 

Wow, learning through experiences – a method that I, as a trainer, used a lot in my courses was applied creatively by my beloved teacher. Thank you, Patrick, for opening my mind and make a better of me.