Expert advises govt focus on innovation
IDEs necessary to achieve Thailand 4.0
Thailand needs to groom more innovative entrepreneurs to achieve Thailand 4.0, a strategic national programme to transition Thailand into a value-based economy, an economic expert has said.
Thanawat Pholwichai, director of the Centre for Economic and Business Forecasting of the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC), said yesterday although the number of entrepreneurs has grown rapidly in recent years, most of them are just ordinary small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), not innovation-driven enterprises (IDEs).
Based on a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey for 2016-17, Thailand’s established-business ownership rate of 27.5% is the second highest among 65 countries polled.
However, among these entrepreneurs, Mr Thanawat estimated that less than 1,000 are IDEs and none of them have more than 50 million clients.
“IDEs are different from SMEs in terms of their way of thinking and conducting business operations. While SMEs often show gradual growth, IDEs have the potential to grow their business rapidly with higher scalability.
“However, a strong IDE ecosystem is also required to help entrepreneurs jumpstart their growth and expand their businesses with innovation,” he said.
Mr Thanawat said the good examples of successful IDEs are Uber and Grab which have developed their business ideas based on high-impact problems to serve the needs of consumers with the use of technology.
One successful IDE can have more sales and value than hundreds of SMEs combined, he added.
“In Thailand, we also have some IDEs with high potential to grow and become competitive on a regional or even global scale. For example, we have an entrepreneur who produces robots that can converse with people, issue reminders to take medication and alert a caregiver if a patient has not moved in more than an hour.
“We have another entrepreneur who sells bananas with sticky rice ( khao tom mat) via mobile application, but they need more support, learning sources and an ecosystem to foster them and provide them chances to grow from small fry to global behemoth,” he said.
As part of Thailand’s move towards its 4.0 vision, The Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship Centre of UTCC has launched its new learning programme called “IDE Accelerator”, a project developed from the collaboration between the UTCC’s IDE Centre and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to boost the number of innovative entrepreneurs in Thailand.
“We have set a target to train up to 1,000 entrepreneurs and startups in our IDE Accelerator programme and we expect to help create at least 30-50 Thai IDEs that are competitive on a regional and global scale within the next 3-5 years,” Mr Thanawat said.
According to the IDE Centre’s director, Sakdipon Juasrikul, entrepreneurs and startups selected to participate in the IDE Accelerator will receive coaching from the IDE coaches, as well as training from MIT’s professionals for four months, where each of them will further develop their innovative ideas and perform market testing to achieve their business goals.
“They will be trained under the concept ‘24 steps of disciplined entrepreneurship’ developed by MIT, which is an out-of-the-box way of think for entrepreneurs,” Mr Sakdipon said.
The IDE Centre will also create a business plan competition called the IDE Competition.
Each of the participants will need to expand their business plan as much as possible during the period. All of them will meet with investors and venture funds through the IDE Accelerator programme with a chance to win over two million baht in funds.