Thanks to its timely and appropriate policies to encourage startup activities citywide, from 2016-2020, HCMC welcomed the appearance of various startup supporting centers, 34 incubation centers, 10 working spaces with the total surface area of 33,000m2. They successfully connected 160 startup consultants, 200 experts to over 3,000 startup individuals and groups in the city.
To further boost the startup spirit among the community, HCMC People’s Committee has approved the project ‘Supporting the Development of Innovative Startup Ecosystems in HCMC from 2021-2025’ in hope of increasing the contribution of startups to its GRDP in 2025 to 45-50 percent. 45%-50% while creating a more favorable environment for fast-growing business models based on exploiting intellectual assets and technologies.
This project focuses on the two groups of small & medium-scaled businesses and innovative startups.
Accordingly, the HCMC Department of Science and Technology is going to restructure scientific research programs and boosting activities of technological trading floors so that technology transfers can happen more smoothly. Simultaneously, a system to collect and provide relevant scientific information for research tasks will be developed.
Since the first stage of any innovative startup can hardly attract any private capital source and normally leads to early failure, the Government will play an active role here via supporting organizations and incubation centers. This, in turn, will help form a firm foundation for these new and sensitive startups to improve their own competitive capability, especially those manufacturing staple products of the city.
At the moment, the HCMC Science and Technology Department is launching a range of sub-projects like establishing a network of innovative startup centers, building startup supporting models in accordance with international standards.
Meanwhile, international partnerships with technologically strong nations such as the US or Israel are actively fostered.
So far, the project has been able to attract much attention of the public, leading to a ranking improvement of Vietnam in the Global Innovation Index by 17 positions compared to 2016. Particularly, HCMC now stands at the 225th position in the list of global top innovative centers with 0.995 points.
