Huge trend in innovations noted

The director of the IMD World Competitiveness Centre told a Thailand Management Association conference in Bangkok yesterday that the current “massive trend in innovations” would mean the next generation will witness as many innovations as mankind has seen in the past 2,000 years.
Citing a report from the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research, which found 20 per cent of all new jobs in that country were created by companies less than one year old, and businesses with less than five years accounted for two-thirds of all jobs created in there, Bris said that in the new-economy era, educational institutions should also be able to perform the role of job creation.
“Education institutes are not the only innovation hubs,” he said, referring to the Thai government’s plan to develop industrial clusters with collaboration between the public and private sectors and educational institutions.
Bris also spoke about innovations in public-sector policies in some countries to foster innovation and attract talent, such as the “e-residency” programme of Estonia and a lifetime waiver of income taxes for information-technology |professionals implemented by many countries.
While many of the world’s innovations are being created in Eastern Europe, they end up in the US because of funding and capital-market development factors.
He said Thailand was on the right path in enhancing its competitiveness, since it had decided to focus on particular industries such as logistics, tourism and agriculture, though it would need to work more on establishing trust between its public and private sectors.
“We’ve found there is a lack of trust between the private sector [and] the public sector. I think this is one of the key issues in building competitiveness in Thailand,” he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak raised the example of China’s success in creating millions of entrepreneurs or “mass start-ups”, with universities as a core mechanism.
“Whether we can compete does not depend on the government, it depends on the ‘new players’. How competent are these warriors?” he said.
“Orchestrating” the collaboration between the public and private sectors and educational institutions is crucial if Thailand wants to break through its “middle-income trap” and move to value-based industries, he said.
Isara Vongkusolkit, chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade, said that since attracting young talent was the most important thing that a country has to do, he was preparing to submit a proposal to the prime minister to reform the immigration procedures dividing immigrant groups into four categories, in a bid to draw in global talents and making them fond of Thailand.
Since the farm and service sectors each represent 40 per cent of the country’s workforce, it is crucial to strengthen their competitiveness, he said.
The agriculture sector, especially rice farming, whose productivity is half that of Indonesia’s and much lower than Malaysia’s, has to go more towards “mechanisation” to boost yield per rai.
He said the 11th National Economic and Social Development plan was good “but implementation is not”.

PTT CEO Tevin Vongvanich said Thailand was the only country in Asean that climbed up on the IMD’s global competitiveness ranking, though only two ranks up, this year. Nevertheless, he was disappointed that the country’s ranking in infrastructure criteria was still near the bottom of the total 60 economies ranked in the survey.