The Ministry of Industry, in collaboration with SBM ITB and the Industrial Liaison Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ILP MIT), held an Entrepreneurship Webinar entitled “Empowering Indonesia’s Industry (Empowering Indonesian Industry)” on Tuesday (04/10/2022). In the webinar, Changjie Guo, the Director of the MIT ILP Program, explained how MIT converts ideas into innovations.
MIT is a top world-class university with numerous innovations. The inventions we are familiar with and use daily, such as the world wide web, the transistor radio, e-mail, spreadsheets, and many more, come from MIT.
MIT has also naturally created an innovation ecosystem around it, which is also known as The Boston Innovation Ecosystem. For example, Boeing company established its research office next to MIT.
MIT’s ILP is a program for companies interested in strategic and long-term relationships with MIT. MIT is in touch with companies worldwide, emphasizing new research driven by education. ILP itself is now targeting Indonesian companies. CJ Guo said, “Indonesian (companies) are becoming a great new market for innovation and growth.”
Another speaker in the webinar was Agus Budiyono, the head of CAP Solutions, who spoke about the Entrepreneurial Mindset. Agus, who also studied at MIT, highlighted the entrepreneurship discipline of MIT.
Agus believed that MIT’s influence in innovation and entrepreneurship in the world is enormous, MIT implements the entrepreneur mindset in various types of innovation. Innovation is not only about technology; innovation can be services, customer engagement, profit models, and so on.
The role of MSMEs is also critical. Korea is an example of a developed country whose economy is strongly supported by MSMEs. About half of the manufacturing production in Korea comes from MSMEs. In addition, in education, collaboration is needed between teaching universities, research universities, and entrepreneurship universities.
Jemy Confido from Telkom/ITDRI was also one of the speakers. Jemy suggested how to build digital talent in Indonesia.
Now, building competitive competence and character strength from human resources has become one of the national priorities. Indonesia needs 9 million digital talents for the next 15 years.
In addition, Indonesia also needs to increase its Global Advantage. The market size in Indonesia is ranked 7th, while its innovation capability is ranked 74th. This large gap will be filled by outside sources if there is no growth.
Indonesia, according to Jemy, needs to improve its innovation capabilities to close this gap. Therefore, a strategy is needed to build Indonesia’s digital talent.
“There are various roles or archetypes taken by other countries. For example, Singapore is the Business Hub, and America and China are the Innovation Hub. Seeing Indonesia’s high technology consumption, Indonesia has great potential to position itself as an ICT Patron,” said Jemy.
Furthermore, Eko Agus Prasetio from SBM ITB brought up the topic of industrial empowerment through technopreneurship. Now the company’s mortality rate is very high. Companies need to continue to innovate because even successful companies are in danger of falling if they are complacent and do not continue to innovate.
The challenge is not failing to recognize opportunities but rather that organizational boundaries may limit change. Meanwhile, changes is needed to grow the company.
To answer this problem, it is necessary to develop corporate entrepreneurship in every employee and corporate office holder. Corporate Entrepreneurship is useful for leveraging corporate resources in new arenas, developing new capabilities, and generating company growth.
