Tuesday, January 16, 2007 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES
News
Davao City — Businessmen here are searching for bright students willing to learn entrepreneurial skills and develop ideas that can be turned into the next Google, Yahoo, or YouTube.
The city’s business group is piloting what it describes as a technopreneurship program involving a partnership with the academe. The goal, said Andrei Fournier, the Davao City Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s information and communications technology point person, is develop students who can become top entrepreneurs.
The idea is for students to focus their energies in developing entrepreneurial skills so they can create businesses in the information and communications sector. Most Silicon Valley companies started as big ideas from students, who were able to tap investors and turn them in to big businesses.
"I know we have a lot talented people in Davao who have good ideas," he said. What is needed is to "determine whether these ideas are commercially viable," look for funds and "sustain these ideas to become big investments."
Students will be taught how to become entrepreneurs, particularly on the intricacies of running a business, including human resources development and accounting processes. "This is really to teach them [on] one, how to attract an investor to invest in you and, second, how do you identify an opportunity," Mr. Fournier said.
An entrepreneur is someone who can come up with a new product or a person who can improve an existing product, he said.
In the next five years, the chamber hopes that schools will offer degrees in technopreneurship. Eight schools in the city have agreed to teach a technopreneurship subject as an elective in the next school year, but the chamber is convincing 16 more schools in the city, another in Tagum City, Davao del Norte and one in Digos City, Davao del Sur.
"What we want is to let the people in the city have that culture to become entrepreneurs," he said, claiming the city will not develop through foreign investments, but through investments from locals.
The Philippine-Australian Human Resource Development Fund has set aside P1 million for the project. "We would like the schools to teach a uniform curriculum, but depending on the particular requirement of the schools, the [curriculum] could vary," Mr. Fournier said.
The project is linked to an "incubation center" which helps new companies until they become fully operational. — Carmelito Q. Francisco
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