How Indonesia Makes Thousand of Startups By 2020

Ilustrasi (dok)

JAKARTA (IndoTelko) - Indonesia has a huge ambition in developing the digital economy, even the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Kemenkominfo) aims to create one thousand startups in 2020.

"By seeing the existing potentials, we can achieve the goal because Indonesian youth have very nice innovations, it is up to us to direct these innovations with the needs of business and society," said Indonesian Communications and Information Technology Minister Rudiantara, lately.

The minister said that one of the biggest drawbacks is that most products manufactured and distributed cannot resolve the real problem. Indonesian entrepreneurs are still outnumbered and out-capacity, which was caused from the lack of support of the ecosystem that enables the entrepreneurs growth.

"In fact, 95% of businesses in Indonesia are startups in the field of information and communication technology. My goal is that we can reach US $ 1 billion to develop startups in Indonesia," he explained.

Program
He expressed his institution has gathered stakeholders to provide mentoring on Technoprenur Development Program in Indonesia.

The meeting discussed about various aspects of startup development. Starting from the ideation process with a seminar to boot camp and continued to operation of the incubator or accelerator.

The meeting also discussed on how the specifics of how this program could be scaled up into a national program.

"It will be preceded by initiating the implementation in 50 cities of Indonesia. One of the consideration is the city must have the telecommunications network readiness, the number of potential youth and the number of university or college that can support the development of technoprenur," he said.

The plan, the designed activity cycle would lasts for six months so that in a year can be carried out in two rounds. Activities will be initiated in Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Denpasar, Medan, Balikpapan and Makassar.

"We will design 10 activities, twice in Jakarta to encourage 2000 talks, 1000 Workshop, 500 Hackathon and formed 10 Boot camp Teams," he said.

In the process of the workshop, the entire response or feedback from participants will be formulated into a series of sentences (wording) to be inserted in accordance with the content, the discussion result will be finalized and will then be reported to the participants.

He added that his institution would make a venture capital (VC), which will handle the funds to support the startup later. The VC system, the loan is not an injection of funds. "So the VC will oversee the startups that are ready for funding," he added.

Further, he said that this is basically Indonesia's efforts to change the mindset, the pattern of education for young people with entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial-based.

"Entrepreneurship begins with mindset, creating solutions to various problems through a series of programs to help them find maturity, increased skill, knowledge sharing, and the development of ideas," said Rudiantara.

While the Directorate General Informatics Applications, Heru Bambang Tjahjono, said that the local startup is expected to contribute one per cent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

"The rising number of startup can create two percent of the total population of Indonesia to become entrepreneurs," he said.

Previously, there are many Indonesian startups becomes the most favorite during the Tech in Asia technology event where 85% of visitors are from Indonesia, most visitors were also coming from Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand.

The total visitors were present, 29% of them are startup, 7 investor with an investment of more than US $ 1 billion, and 12% of the total visitors are various parties who want to know more about the ecosystems that are in Indonesia and in the Asian region in general.

In the Bootstrap Alley exhibition area, the Indonesia startup ranks first (76%), followed by Singapore (10%) and Malaysia (5%). For the vertical type industries, eCommerce tops the list (26%), followed by Lifestyle (8%) and enterprise (7%).

Recorded 4,207 visitors attended the Tech in Asia Jakarta 2015 and interact with strategic innovations displayed by 235 participant’s of the startup exhibitions.

Startup movement in Indonesia has made financial institutions such as Bank Mandiri to co-found a Venture Capital, Mandiri Capital. Mandiri Capital exists by carrying an initial capital of Rp500 billion and will focus on startup that develops innovative payment services that are relevant to the eCommerce industry. (es)