MBI & INNOVATION

Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam’s innovation sectors are largely being led by young entrepreneurs. The region’s young, energetic, and increasingly tech savvy population must be nurtured to unlock its substantial innovation potential.

MBI promotes incubation and acceleration of enterprises by helping startups access a larger pool of resources. In addition to access to finance, MBI supports mentorship programs to help startups develop their business management skills. We also extract bottom-up policy lessons from piloting innovative business models in partnership with young (and especially women) entrepreneurs.

Tourism
AgriTech
Fintech
Smart Cities

Mekong Innovative Startup Tourism

The Mekong Innovative Startup Tourism (MIST) is the first tourism accelerator in the Greater Mekong Subregion aiming to provide startups everything they need to launch successfully, achieve profitability, create jobs and impact communities. It is a joint venture of the Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office and the Mekong Business Initiative. It receives regional funding, advisory and technical support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Government of Australia, Amadeus Next, the Pacific Asia Travel Association, and Village Capital. It has been endorsed by young entrepreneurs associations and startup groups in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Learn more about MIST

Mekong Agriculture Technology Challenge

The Mekong Agriculture Technology Challenge (MATCh) is the first agribusiness acceleration program in the Mekong region. MATCh seeks to enhance the competitiveness, inclusiveness and sustainability of the Mekong Region’s agricultural industry as a leading global supplier of “safe food for all” through innovation and entrepreneurship.  

The program provides opportunities for businesses in agritech to win innovation grants, launch successfully, achieve profitability and in turn, create jobs and sustainable impact to communities in the Mekong region.  

Similar to MIST, MATCh will run two accelerator tracks: 

  • The first track seeks innovative early stage agritech startups and traditional agriculture business models.  
  • The second track seeks mature local or international agritech companies and SMEs looking to expand with the Mekong Region.   

 The program will run from October 2017 to March 2018, and will host a series of bootcamps, networking and competitive events that will culminate in a final pitch.

Learn more about MATCh

Fintech Challenge Vietnam

The Fintech Challenge Vietnam program has been built around two main themes: collaboration and financial inclusion. The Challenge is open to fintech companies from both inside and outside of Vietnam who are interested to collaborate with commercial banks, other financial institutions—or even each other.  In fact, it would be great for a local fintech to team with a local bank and a fintech from another market, say, Singapore, Thailand or elsewhere.  But where the fintech is based is not as important as the technology or business model that they have developed—and its usefulness for Vietnam.

MBI wants this Challenge program to create opportunities for Vietnam’s commercial banks to engage with fintechs, and to consider how they might take advantage of the technology and creative new approaches that fintechs have to offer.

The Challenge is focused on those financial technology solutions that improve or expand financial services to those people who may currently be poorly served by the financial sector in Vietnam.  Poorly served customer segments might include micro and small enterprises (MSEs) and people living in rural areas, but also urban consumers lacking access to the most up-to-date payment solutions.  So financial inclusion is another major theme for the Fintech Challenge Vietnam Program.

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Smart City Innovation Challenge

Vietnam’s urban centers are growing at the fastest clip in ASEAN and challenging the country’s cities to provide affordable housing, control traffic congestion, manage waste, supply clean water, integrate green spaces and effectively plan for sustainability.  

The Global Smart City Innovation Challenge is looking for deployable solutions from across the globe that can address these issues facing Vietnam’s cities. The challenge invites businesses that have deployable solutions to these issues to Vietnam and match them with match them with local program mentors to customise their market-ready solutions into contextualised prototypes ready for adoption across Vietnam’s growing urban centers.

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MEKONG BUSINESS INITIATIVE

Email: contact@mbi.com
Cornerstone Building, 15th Floor, 16 Phan Chu Trinh, Hanoi, Vietnam