WHAT would it take to grow more successful startups in the Philippines? Apparently for different stakeholders, the answers may vary.
For tech startup advocate Jojy Azurin, the key to having a thriving startup ecosystem lies in the numbers game, in which the Philippines is not much of a player yet.
“Israel has 20,000 start-ups. Bangalore, the city in India, has 20,000 startups. We only have 547 startups on record. How do we grow this number?
This is where the government comes in,” he said in a discussion during the Geeks on a Beach Conference in Puerto Princesa City, Palawan on Thursday.
Speaking to some 400 participants in the fifth edition of GOAB, a platform for sharing among tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as well as members of the academe, Azurin said the government can make the biggest contribution to this growth by introducing the startup mindset in the basic education curriculum.
He said science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) should be strengthened in schools and that entrepreneurship, specifically business math, should be pushed in the country’s education system.
The key to having many successful startups in the Philippines is to have the local government as front-liners and backed by the private sector.
“It’s just a matter of pushing them for more innovation,” he said.
For Azurin, a startup is an institution or group of individuals operating under uncertain conditions. Success for startups would then mean overcoming these uncertainties, he said.
Maria Elena Arbon, director of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in Cebu, said that the entrepreneurial level in the Philippines is quite low, not only in the tech department, but also among brick-and-mortar enterprises.
“The level of entrepreneurship of people or business going into startups or tech startups is very low. In general, our entrepreneurship drive is not very high,” she said.
Arbon said mentorship would be a good venue to address this gap, which the DTI in Cebu is being aggressive about.
In July last year, the DTI introduced a mentorship program for Cebu-based tech start-ups called Launchpad which was aimed at elevating these ventures into viable small to medium-sized enterprises (MSE).
Emmy Lou Delfin, program manager of eInnovation at the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), said there is a need for greater collaboration between the government and private sector.
“We need a vibrant ecosystem for startups in the Philippines. A lot of changes have happened between five years ago until today. A lot of changes are still happening,” she said.
Delfin added that the startup advocacy was only happening in Metro Manila then, but has now expanded to Capiz, Bohol, Cebu, Bacolod and Iloilo.
Moving forward, the government official vowed that the DICT, DTI, and Department of Science and Technology will continue collaborating with private stakeholders to further help the local startup community.
For PSIA president Jonathan de Luzuriaga, the industry should invest more in talent development as well as be more “benevolent” to startups just as it had been to the IT-BPM sector in the past.
“It’s the combination of all of this — talent development, collaboration, and benevolence. The country has the ability to become unselfish and to look at the bigger picture so we can all benefit,” he said.
De Luzuriaga provides a simpler definition of “successful” start-ups and that these are the ventures that are still around surviving.
“As long as you’re still around, you’re successful. We’re putting such a high benchmark without considering that all moving parts are not in place yet. We’re still getting there,” he said.
StartupPH.org, an umbrella organization for stakeholders and supporters of the startup and innovation communities, found that there have been 547 tech start-ups in the Philippines since 2014.
Jojo Flores, StartupPH.org convenor, said that they have only started looking for these start-ups in order to link them with potential investors.
Of this number, he said 320 are verified and are active while the rest are either “dead” or still up for verification.