Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh speaks at a working session with the National Innovatio Center (Photo: VOV)

The 13th National Party Congress set out a goal of making Vietnam a developing country with modern industry, surpassing the low middle-income level by 2025, a developing country with modern industry and high middle income by 2030, and a developed, high-income country by 2045 by promoting science, technology and innovative development. 

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh visits the National Innovation Center (Photo: VOV)

Establishing an innovation ecosystem

Since it was founded in 2019, the National Innovation Center has established an innovation ecosystem with the engagement of the State, research institutes, and enterprises. Many big partners of the Center are large foreign technology corporations, technology and innovation centers, and nearly 200 domestic and international investment funds with nearly 1,600 Vietnamese experts and intellectuals around the world. The Center has become a pioneer in researching and proposing cooperation mechanisms, incubation models, and investment support for innovative startups.

The NIC has implemented programs to improve the innovation capacity of institutes, universities and localities and coordinated with major international universities to provide training courses on innovation, digital transformation, and commercialization of technology research.

The Center has cooperated with Google to organize a digital talent development program drawing thousands of Vietnamese students. It has coordinated with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in implementing human resource development activities, collaborated with STEAM for Vietnam to organize computer programming and STEM courses for more than 20,000 elementary and middle school students, organized a robotics competition for students, and developed an online system for training governance.

The Vietnam Innovation Network has been expanded to Germany, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (China), Europe, and the US, which serves as a huge intellectual resource, ready to participate and contribute to technology and innovation activities and projects in Vietnam.

Creating incentives to promote innovation

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment to coordinate with ministries, sectors and agencies to create a legal framework to build an innovation ecosystem and a creative incubator. Stakeholders are urged to establish an innovation fund to promote innovation, and perfect the Innovation Center model suitable to Vietnam's conditions. The Prime Minister asked for more investment in facilities and equipment to aid research and innovation activities. He stressed the need to strengthen the national database system to develop big data and artificial intelligence.

The Prime Minister said he wanted the NIC to become a rendezvous of intellectuals from around the world to create resources for spreading benefits and values of innovation to the entire society. He said investment in innovation is investment in development.

He requested the Ministry of Planning and Investment to coordinate with the Ministry of Public Security and other agencies to effectively exploit the national database on population and other databases. It’s also important to complete the Innovation Center model so that it can combine with other ecosystems and digitize the Center’s operation.

In the current digital era, innovation plays a very important role in the development and competitiveness of each country. Creating a favorable environment and adequate investment to promote innovation will help Vietnam realize its goal of stronger national development based on science and technology.