Sweden and Vietnam – co-creating partners in innovation

Innovation Pioneers Summit 2020 was organised yesterday

In a conference format consisting of two half days on November 10-11, they will share, learn and co-create with other leading innovators from Sweden, South Korea, and Singapore through a series of learning sessions and innovation classes. They will get exclusive insights from real innovation projects that have been executed with a collaborative approach with the goal of including as many perspectives as possible in new ways to reach greater results.

The event is jointly organised by the Swedish Institute and Innovation Pioneers.

Initiated in 2008, Innovation Pioneers is Sweden's largest network of innovation practitioners with more than 50 top innovative organisations from the Swedish innovation ecosystem. Innovation Pioneers members work with innovation on both the strategic and operational levels. They are leaders and visionaries, practitioners, and strategists.

“Our vision is to build innovation capabilities through joint development and networking between top representatives from the innovation community. With this in mind, we have selected three countries in Asia where we see particular potential for promoting the exchange of innovation leadership, and these nations are Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam,” said the organisers of the 2020 Innovation Pioneers Summit – which is Sweden's largest network of innovation practitioners.

Johan Alvin, First Secretary, head of Trade Promotion, Economic and Political Affairs, Embassy of Sweden in Vietnam stressed that, "If there is one area of common interest for Sweden and Vietnam to collaborate and work more intensively with each other in the coming days, months, and years, it is definitely innovation."

He said, "Sweden is a knowledge-based economy and one of the most innovative nations in the world. I believe that one of the main explanations of this success is the openness and adaptability in the Swedish society that promote and stimulate innovations. Innovations are not only important for economic growth and development, they are key for tackling a whole range of challenges such as environmental sustainability. To build back better and greener post-COVID-19, we must resort to innovative ideas and practices."

Sharing about how the Vietnamese tech community is fostering startup culture and ecosystem, Huong Nguyen, head of Community, JunctionX Hanoi said that her organisation is working closely with mentors from startups, experts from collaborations, accelerators, and the rest of the nonprofit community. She said, "Building a developer community requires patience but can also be a fun journey if you’ve got the passion and are willing to find happiness while doing it. People behind the innovation is the most important factor, they might fail in the first idea but will have 100 more successful ideas to come."

Jen Vu Huong, community programme manager of BK-Holdings, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, noted that the university is striving to boost the innovation process through developing an open innovation culture, saying, "The challenges are seeing and making innovation as a strategic development plan to close the gap between universities and the market – from the top down with policies and the bottom-up with each individual as a creative agent of change."

She also underlined that, "It requires a strong collaboration between individual-individual, department-department, universities-businesses-government – and it is so important now to have an innovative 'conductor' to connect all the dots – all good efforts of all universities to boost their innovation culture."