OPEN INNOVATION: Opportunities for businesses to develop by taking advantage of external resources

The COVID-19 pandemic has put businesses at unprecedented challenges to overcome difficulties and make breakthroughs in this new period. Open innovation is one of the solutions. On November 22, 2021, the webinar “Current status and solutions to promote open innovation.” was co-organized by Viet Lotus and IDG.

According to Mr. Pham Hong Quat, Head of General Department of NATEC (Ministry of Science and Technology), open innovation is a new approach to collect ideas and improve businesses innovation. Through collaboration with external partners to bring additional knowledge and technology to their organizations. This is a sharing economy model, if not do so, enterprises will lose their competitiveness, not be able to take advantage of available external resources, especially during the 4.0 technology boom.

“The difference of open innovation is that enterprises willing to bring their internal problems that need to be solved to the outside for all parties to see, evaluate and handle; dare to use external solutions to solve their problems. If it works, open innovation will bring benefits to all three parties: businesses with problems, businesses with solutions, and the business community,” said Mr. Pham Hong Quat.

In reality, open innovation has been directed by many countries to develop. Recently, a small group of Vietnamese startup professors and students received a $30,000 prize from Singapore’s Digital Bank to solve the blockchain problem. After that, a series of banks came to place orders. This shows that if one business places an order and the Government stands by to guarantee, those technology products and solutions can expand the market for other businesses.

Looking from international experience, Mr. Vu Viet Ngoan, Chairman and CEO of Viet Lotus, said that open innovation, a new concept since 2003, and in the past 7-10 years, it a real boom. Through practice from pioneer countries such as the US, Singapore, Israel… there are two features of open innovation. Accordingly, open innovation creates a rich, diverse, and developed ecosystem for businesses. The connection and interaction in this ecosystem are tight and efficient. In particular, mechanisms and policies and the strong involvement of the Government have created this tight bond.

Mr. Nguyen Thanh Nam, a founder of Funix (the online educational organization), acknowledged that currently, the policies promulgated by the Government are too open when actively participating in trade agreements. But the hardest thing to have open innovation is designing a fully open legal system and process.

Viet Lotus