Jakarta, 29 April 2021: The third episode of ERIA’s Entrepreneurship, Start-Up, and Innovation (E-S-I) webinar series with the theme ‘Deep Tech and the Future Economy’ was held on 29 April 2021 and attracted more than 290 participants from the Asia-Pacific region. The E-S-I webinar series discusses how innovation and entrepreneurship contribute to the post-pandemic recovery across ASEAN and East Asia with regional entrepreneurs, innovators, experts, and policymakers.

 The five webinar speakers were:

• Cortilia Lin, Co-Founder, Head of Strategy and Marketing, Kyalio, Singapore
• Souliyo Vongdala, Chief Executive Officer, LOCA Company and Vice President, Lao ICT Commerce Association (LICA), Lao PDR
• Xelia Tong, Managing Partner, Investor Relations & Partnerships, ScaleUp, Malaysia
• Kohei Kurihara, Co-Founder and CEO, Privacy by Design Lab, Japan
• Aimi Ramlee, Founder and Director of Digital Innovation and Growth, Tyne Solutions and Co-founder of SoutheastAsiaWomen.org, Brunei Darussalam

Dr Giulia Ajmone Marsan, Director of Strategy and Partnership, ERIA, opened the webinar by highlighting the impact of digital technology and how it enables innovation and entrepreneurship developments. However, she also highlighted the emerging risks and threats related to digitalisation and emerging technology, such as issues around data privacy as well as biases and discrimination.

Ms Cortilia Lin, Co-founder and Head of Strategy and Marketing of Kyalio from Singapore explained how she uses technology adoption by integrating Virtual Reality with medical education. By utilising technology, her company is able to get larger access and opportunities, she added. She also highlighted the importance for users to understand and integrate technology adoption into daily life.

Mr Soulio Vongdala, Chief Executive Officer, LOCA Company and Vice President of LAO ICT Commerce Association (LICA) from Lao PDR, shared the benefit of using technology for accelerating customer experience while at the same time raising revenue for his business. In addition, he highlighted the importance of keeping and gathering data points to improve business development for Lao PDR as it remains a challenge, in particular for MSMEs.

Ms Xelia Tong, Managing Partner, Investor Relations and Partnership of ScaleUp pointed out the emerging importance of technology adoption in Malaysian industrial development in the post-recovery world. She described the rapid acceleration of technology adoption and the increasing number of start-ups in the Malaysian eco-system over the past couple years.

Mr Kohei Kurihara, Co-Founder and CEO of Privacy by Design Lab from Japan discussed the importance of data privacy regulation to protect the privacy of individual customers. Mr Kurihara highlighted the importance of public private partnerships and the role of the private sector to design and develop privacy policies around digital data. He also suggested that entrepreneurs integrate customers’ data privacy into their business model.

Ms Aimi Ramlee, Founder and Digital Innovation and Growth Director, Tyne Solutions, Brunei Darussalam, gave a brief overview on the importance of Artificial Intelligence and data collection for digitalisation and technology adoption across the ASEAN region and the implications for policy-making. She also highlighted the emergence of problematic issues such as data biases and discrimination, which are affecting people around ASEAN, in particular women, refugees, and vulnerable communities.

The webinar was co-hosted and moderated by Mr TJ Ooi, Founder of Curated Connectors, a Singapore-based start-up. During the Q&A session, moderated by Ms Lina Maulidina Sabrina, Programme Officer at ERIA, speakers discussed regional incubators practices, the usage of regulatory sandboxes and the challenges to provide more inclusive data collection.

ERIA’s E-S-I webinar series is organised under ERIA’s Strategy and Partnership Programme, funded by Australia.