Over the past decades, technology adoption and digital transformation have allowed entrepreneurs to be instantly connected with people, resources, and ideas all over the world. The growing global connectivity has fostered opportunities and access for entrepreneurs to translate their ideas into a business that could reach millions of consumers in the global market while expanding their connections beyond borders. ASEAN and East Asia have exhibited strong economic development with high-growth and innovative enterprises over the years, and their entrepreneurship ecosystem has become a driver of the global innovation frontier. The COVID-10 pandemic has accelerated the trends towards borderless entrepreneurship with many new businesses trying to connect with global markets from the very beginning of the pandemic. However, borderless entrepreneurs are confronted by a number of challenges related to a lack of regulatory coherence across the region’s countries as well as a wide range of consumer preferences and behaviors.
The seventh episode of ERIA’s Entrepreneurship, Start-Up, and Innovation (E-S-I) webinar series with the theme ‘Borderless Entrepreneurship – Is that the future?’ was held on 31 August 2021 and attracted more than 200 participants from the Asia-Pacific region.
Laurent Tam Nguyen, Co-founder and General Manager of Digital Mekong, Vietnam shared his experience in creating Digital Mekong, an agile virtual market agency that addresses the need for an entrepreneurship freelancer market in Vietnam and ASEAN. This regional virtual platform now serves clients from all over the world and will continue to expand its borderless business moving forward. From his perspective, Covid-19 has shaped a profound megatrend where digitalization is now the way to do business. He highlighted two important opportunities that borderless entrepreneurship can offer: the ability to work without physical boundaries and to have more autonomy to determine the personal and professional life balance. As the trend of borderless entrepreneurship is escalating quickly, he emphasized several soft skills that all entrepreneurs should have which include resilience, adaptivity, empathy, and transparency in managing start-up teams and building businesses.
Interview session with Laurent Tam Nguyen: