VIETNAM

Speaker: Dr. Nguyen Phan Quoc

※番号は、質問者を表し、同一質問者は同一番号になっています。

Q1: On the page 11 of your presentation you mentioned about the IPP – InventionPartnership Program. Could you please tell us more in details about it?
A1: Happily, I support IPP. I support and have been involved it since its first phase. IPP
is an internship program to support innovation between the Philippine government andVietnamese government. Philippines support with a lot of money; it supports Vietnam
in a lot of fields. First, they look for some potentially marketable inventions. In the firstterm we had 65 projects with grants from IPP. The second activity is the capacitation ofmanagement and human resources. I was happy to be selected as one of the first person
to study in such a program, which is a combination of two other universities to learn
about innovation management – and learn about the essence of innovation. You can see
in my biography I am the Chief of management of technology and innovation. As a thirdfield, we also support seminars on innovations. Innovation, all of you understand very
well, but in Vietnam it is still a very difficult term to understand. So there are seminars
about what is the meaning of innovation. For many, innovation means inventions,successfully commercialized. But for others, not that much. That is why now we are on
the roll to disseminate the right meaning of innovation. I think the IPP is successful
here, because after four years of struggle now policy makers and companies understanda little bit what innovation is. Now we are in the second term: to support specific areas.
For example, they chose some potential fields (of technology), such as biotechnology,
new materials, to support and to give some knowledge on how to commercialize new IP
assets. I think IPP is very good.
Q1: Thank you very much, I haven’t checked the data, but according to some Japanesenews, some foreign companies what to remove the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
from Chinese factories to Vietnam, because of wages and so on. The transfer ofinvestment might demand some transfer of technology. What do you think about it?
A1: In my personal point of view, FDI is good. Vietnam can improve with FDI, and with
FDI we receive technology from others countries. But, in fact, even when Vietnam
receives FDI not all companies are willing to transfer technologies. In many case, frommy 20 years of experience, normally regarding FDI only holding company wants totransfer technology to their small local branch. And even so, they normally do not1

transfer too much cutting edge technology to us. We want to learn from the foreign
investors but it is difficult. Therefore, we now need to foster our innovation, to walkwith our own foots.
Q2: Thank you very much for the presentation. I am just curious how much these
output from the research institutions are published in English language. Maybe you do
not have specific statistics, but what is your general feeling about it?
A2: You mean about science and technology journals? I am not focusing here on papers,
but we have both English and Vietnamese journals. Happily, two years ago, one journal
about material physics in Vietnam was ranked in the I.S.I.S and SCOPUS. In Vietnam,
we have full V – the first is from the Vietnam National University of Hanoi, and thesecond, there is an University in HoChiMin City, the third, the biggest is the Academyfor Science and Technology and Academy for Social Sciences. We have so many articles
on international journals. But the importance of this relates to what you are thinking.
For researcher, papers are very important for their careers but they forget to patent andhow to implement then. We are trying to change their minds. Now we have the law tothe criteria to become a professor. One of the criteria for the becoming a professor, in the
future in Vietnam, is required I.S.I.S paper and patents.
Q3: Do you have a law specialized for innovation? We think that the problem is nothaving a specific law. Because there is the problem of implementation, it is notworkable.
A3: We have a national policy on innovation but no specific law for innovation.
Innovation goes on so many fields, we have the law on patents, on technological transfer,on technology, and we have a law about incubators and startup.
Q3: How to make sure if society has been innovative enough.
A3: We need to build an innovative environment, an innovative thinking in our society.
We need to bring innovative culture to businessman. Before deciding on how to create
innovative culture, we need to decide what innovation is.

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