Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh emphasised Vietnam’s policy on promoting innovation-driven economic growth while attending a dialogue with the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s startup and innovator community as part of the WEF’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2024 in Dalian city, China, on June 25.
Sharing Vietnam’s measures and priorities on technology, resources, and innovation development, he said that innovation has become one of the main drivers of economic growth in every country, especially in the era of globalisation, international integration, and the fourth Industrial Revolution.
It not only helps deal with regional or global difficulties and challenges but also foster sustainable development in each country and the whole world.
With such awareness, he noted, over the past years, Vietnam has taken a number of practical and effective actions to boost innovation such as building priority mechanisms and policies for facilitating innovation and startups, while creating development strategies and programmes that focus on digital economy, green economy, circular economy, sharing economy, and knowledge-based economy, particularly the sectors generating high added value like big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, semiconductor, and hydrogen.
Besides, the country has been investing efforts in developing infrastructure, including digital, electricity, water, transport, and social infrastructure, and also training human resources, especially high-quality personnel. It has also been mobilising resources, of which internal resources, including human, nature, cultural and historical traditions, form the fundamental, strategic, long-term, and decisive factor while external resources, including finance, technology, administration and human resources training, are an important and breakthrough factor.
Vietnam has used public investment to guide private investment and harnessed every social resource to facilitate innovation and startups, according to PM Chinh.
He said many world-leading technology firms like Google, Apple, Intel, Synopsys, Meta, and Nvidia have been moving to invest in Vietnam.
Talking about the initiatives carried out to assist startup and innovative companies in Vietnam, the government leader highlighted several solutions being taken such as perfecting regulations and policies to promote innovation and startups, implementing national-level programs and projects to support the startup and innovation ecosystem, assisting students to translate their business ideas into reality, and carrying out a program to aid businesses’ digital transformation efforts.
Vietnam is pressing on with improving technical infrastructure to support innovation, training innovation human resources, including a plan to develop manpower for the semiconductor industry by 2030, and mobilising international resources, he added.
Replying to a question about the role of foreign startups in Vietnam’s innovation-driven growth and transition to a knowledge-based economy, PM Chinh said foreign startups are an impulse for innovation as seen in their role in transferring technology and knowledge, creating competition, and enhancing international cooperation to speed up the transition to a knowledge-based economy.
Therefore, Vietnam always welcomes, encourages, and creates condition for foreign businesses to invest in the fields of agriculture, industry, and services in a green, clean, and sustainable manner, he stated.
At the dialogue, the PM talked about many issues related to development plans and opportunities for young Vietnamese in emerging industries like AI, semiconductor, and big data.
He also mentioned some global issues to which there should be global and people-based approaches that uphold multilateralism and reinforce international solidarity.
The Vietnamese leader expressed his belief that the world will manage to surmount all difficulties and work towards shared prosperity.
