Reviewing the nation's achievements in the nearly 40 years of Doi Moi (renovation), the PM noted that agriculture helped the country escape poverty after the devastating war and ensured national food security, becoming one of the world's leading rice exporters. Innovation and development in industry can contribute to reaching upper-middle income status. 

In 2025, Vietnam's per capita income is estimated to be over $5,000. Science, technology, innovation, digital transformation, and green transition will lead the country to become a developed, high-income nation with rapid and sustainable development.

GDP growth in 2025 is expected to reach 8 percent, with an average growth rate of 6.3 percent in 2021–2025, 1.6 times higher than the global average. Excluding the Covid-19 year of 2021, Vietnam’s average growth in the 2022–2025 period is estimated at 7.2 percent per year, 2.1 times the global growth rate, according to IMF data.

The PM affirmed that innovative entrepreneurship is a strategic choice and a top investment priority. It is the key to opening development opportunities for enterprises and an important driver of fast and sustainable economic growth for nations, especially in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

However, he pointed out that due to a later starting point, Vietnam’s startup and innovation ecosystem still lags behind the region and the world, and is not yet commensurate with the intellectual potential and capabilities of the Vietnamese people.

He believes that there must be satisfactory answers for many big questions:  How to effectively promote the linkage between domestic enterprises and FIEs, so that Vietnamese businesses can participate more deeply in the global value chain? How can Vietnamese products assert their value and reach further and wider in regional and international markets? Where will Vietnam stand in the current global semiconductor value chain? What is the core focus? Design, packaging, testing, manufacturing, equipment, materials, or a combination? What is the strategic priority - deep development, core technology, or broad expansion of the ecosystem? 

“These are questions posed to managers, scientists, and institutions, and we need to contemplate the appropriate choices.”

When the whole society innovates, the country will transform strongly

He said that innovation means refreshing traditional growth drivers while effectively exploiting new growth drivers to create a breakthrough development. 

For businesses, it is about promoting core strengths more effectively and researching and building new, solid competitive capabilities in the domestic, regional, and global markets. 

For every citizen, it is the tireless effort to enhance existing capabilities, and foster new strengths to adapt and assert themselves in an era of rapid transformation and sustainable development.

"When every individual innovates, every business innovates and the whole society innovates, our country will transform strongly and surpass itself. And when the spirit of innovation spreads, Vietnam will take great strides on the journey of rapid and sustainable development," he said.

The PM stressed that developing domestic technological capacity is the path to building an independent and self-reliant economy, associated with substantive and effective international integration. The creative startup ecosystem is the foundation to ensure technological autonomy and national innovation, and is the key to unlocking the great potential of the country.

In his speech, the PM also mentioned key orientations to make Vietnam a creative startup nation so that Vietnam can continue to have technology unicorns, to catch up, move forward, and potentially surpass others in the current global technological flow.

TECHFEST Vietnam 2025 took place in the context of the country’s implementation of the Politburo’s Resolution 57-NQ/TW on breakthroughs in science, technology, innovation and digital transformation, and the Government’s finalization of the National Strategy on Creative Startups.

In 2025, Vietnam's startup ecosystem entered a new growth phase. The country currently has nearly 4,000 creative startup businesses and two technology unicorns. Vietnam's Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025 ranks 44th out of 139 countries, and the Creative Startup Ecosystem Index ranks 55th out of 100 countries. 

Major Vietnamese cities have entered the top 1000 global startup cities, with Hanoi ranking 148th, HCMC 110th, and Da Nang 766th, thereby connecting domestic resources with the region and the world, elevating Vietnam to the group of the three fastest-growing startup ecosystems and ranking fifth in the ASEAN region.

Du Lam