Nguyen Manh Cuong, deputy chief secretariat of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST), said Vietnam’s innovative ecosystem appeared six years ago and is still young. However, Vietnam has been named among the groups of dynamic countries in international reports about innovation indexes.

In the 2023 World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) report on Global Innovation Index (GII), Vietnam ranks 46th among 132 surveyed countries. It has also been honored as one of seven average-income countries that have gained biggest improvements in innovation in the last decade.

The government of Vietnam has been paying attention to developing its innovative ecosystem by helping to remove difficulties and creating attractive policies to encourage enterprises, especially small and medium sized, to apply new technologies.

In general, technology life cycles are short. Apple’s iPhone, for example, has the commercial life span of one year, but its technology life cycle is just six months. So, the biggest challenge for Vietnam is arranging resources to keep pace with rapid innovations.

MST is following a simple approach. Science and technology are providing knowledge, while innovation means turning knowledge into money.

Lynn Hoang, Binance Vietnam Country Director, said Vietnam lags behind the world in terms of technology application. But with Generative AI and blockchain, it is at the same starting point with other countries.

In the field of blockchain, Vietnam has had a good start with leading projects. Sky Mavis, for example, the creator of the well-known blockchain-based Axie Infinity, considered a unicorn startup of Vietnam, just needed three years to obtain assets of over $1 billion. And three of the five founders of the unicorn are Vietnamese.

However, she warned that technology changes rapidly. Though Vietnam has made a good start, it still needs good solutions for long-term competition and a long-term strategy for technology development.

Poor technology application

CEO of TMA Innovation Tran Phuc Hong commented that while Vietnam has many technology firms which provide technological solutions to the world market, businesses in Vietnam have been lazy about applying the technologies.

Many businesses delay technology application and only use new technological solutions if crises occur. Vietnamese technology firms are confident in catching up with the world in terms of technology, but many still cannot see the benefits of technology application in their business.

TMA, for example, has developed a smart camera used for factories and buildings. The product just needs one AI chip to analyze videos and discover abnormal things without having to use many workers. However, very few businesses and organizations in Vietnam have used it, though it is useful for both public and private affairs.

Cuong, representing the watchdog agency, said that Vietnamese enterprises have been slow to apply new technologies.

Enterprises should think about if they should renovate and apply new technologies everyday. Vietnam is walking abreast the world in blockchain and AI development, but whether it can speed up and keep up pace with the world will still depend on many things, including policies.

Blockchain companies themselves, for example, are looking for the interference between technology progress and policies. New technologies are obviously going more rapidly than policies, therefore, innovative firms need to find the interference point. Other countries are seeking reasonable policies for the new technologies, while Vietnam still keeps the ‘observation’ attitude. Lynn Hoang expected that there would be a transparent legal framework for new technologies in Vietnam.

Tran Viet Huan, CTO of Son Kim Group, also said that policies and legal framework play the decisive role in the development of things, including technologies.

In 2008, when he worked for IBM, he and his co-workers deployed the cloud computing technology for the first time in Vietnam. One year later, at an event in Thailand, when listening to the presentations by experts there, he said that Vietnam went rapidly, but its foundation is not as solid as other regional countries. Vietnam is still behind other countries in cloud computing.

Le My