Incubating creative enterprises

One of the key factors contributing to economic growth, boosting national competitiveness, and cultivating a new generation of entrepreneurs has been recognized as creative entrepreneurship in recent years. Vietnam's startup ecosystem is vividly shown thanks to the emergence of several assistance programs, incubation centers, incubators, and creative spaces around the nation.

From a commercial and market standpoint, however, an interesting fact is becoming apparent: although the number of incubation programs is rising, there are still relatively few businesses that are genuinely viable, expanding, and producing long-term value. This indicates that the existing incubation approach has to be thoroughly and carefully reevaluated.

Many incubation activities but few mature businesses

The State, local governments, academic institutions, and intermediate groups have all made significant contributions to the startup movement. Nonetheless, most of today's incubator programs still place a strong emphasis on teaching fundamental skills, setting up concept contests, pitching events, or demo days. While these actions are essential, they are insufficient to create a company that can function autonomously and compete in the market.

In actuality, very few programs help businesses reach a stage where they have a proven business model, steady revenue, positive cash flow, and a well-defined expansion strategy. Many businesses have fended for themselves, without funding, managerial expertise, and market contacts, after finishing the incubation phase, triggering a high market exit rate.

Systemic challenges

Incubating innovative enterprises is more firmly rooted in organizational execution, strategic design, and style of thinking than it is in financial resources or physical infrastructure.

First and foremost, thinking is a challenge. For young people, startup is still seen in many provinces and cities as a movement or an experiential activity. From a business standpoint, however, entrepreneurship is a risky career option that requires strong self-control, managerial abilities, and market knowledge. It is challenging for incubation programs to set high enough criteria and requirements for companies when entrepreneurship is not yet regarded as a meaningful career option.

The incubation strategy presents the second difficulty. Many initiatives lack sectoral concentration, are fragmented in their implementation, and are unrelated to local competitive advantages. Startups lack a continuous development path and are quickly disrupted when they join the market because there is no clear distinction between pre-incubation, incubation, acceleration, and post-incubation.

The policy challenge comes in third. Despite the establishment of a startup assistance policy, it is nonetheless disjointed, temporary, and input-oriented. Due to the lack of significant implementation of mechanisms like sandboxes, innovation procurement, or public-private partnerships in incubation, startups and incubation organizations are reluctant to try out disruptive new models.

And lastly, it is the problem of human resources. Mentors and incubators with real-world expertise are still lacking in the startup ecosystem. Many startup programs have excellent theoretical faculty, but they lack entrepreneurs who have ever run enterprises or successfully rebuilt after a failure. As a result, the incubation process's usefulness is greatly diminished.

Entrepreneurship Education: Bottlenecks to be addressed

From a business standpoint, entrepreneurship education is the most important yet weakest link. The majority of modern entrepreneurship education programs still place a strong emphasis on concepts, written business models, and presentation techniques. In the meanwhile, formal training has not been provided for fundamental entrepreneurial abilities, including market thinking, sales, cash flow management, risk management, and leadership in an unpredictable environment.

As a result, many businesses with brilliant ideas are unable to commercialize their concepts and endure market fluctuations. Incubation will struggle to generate entrepreneurs who are competitive enough in the setting of deep integration if entrepreneurship education is not reorganized to be closely linked to enterprises and the market.

Shifting from a movement to a business strategy

Startup incubation should not be seen as only a movement to promote innovation but rather as a tool for business development and boosting competitiveness in the context of a fast-changing market.

This necessitates a fundamental change from broad assistance to targeted investment, from theoretical instruction to practical help, and from counting programs to gauging business performance.

A healthy incubation ecosystem must be connected to value chains, concentrate on important industries, and have substantial market, investor, and company engagement. In addition, the policy must promote public-private collaborations in incubation, risk-sharing, and controlled experimentation.

Conclusion

There are plenty of startup incubation programs, but few business development strategies; there are plenty of ideas, but few commercialization skills; and there are plenty of policies, but few market connections. As a result, it is essential to raise the three-way connections (Institute-School, Government, and Enterprise) and enhance the quality of the business incubator ecosystem.