Kickstart Ventures, Inc., the most active early-stage
investment fund in the country, represented the Philippine telecom industry at
the GSMA Mobile Asia Expo innovation workshop in Shanghai, China which tackled
current initiatives to foster and promote new ways of doing things.
GSMA is an association of mobile
operators and related companies devoted to supporting the standardizing,
deployment and promotion of the GSM mobile telephone system.
On the topic of "Creating
Innovation from Within - Fostering Mobile Innovation," Kickstart President
Minette Navarrete joined Tetsuzo Matsumoto, Senior Advisor, Softbank Mobile
Corporation; Guillaume Mascot, Director of Public Affairs, Alcatel-Lucent; and Paul
Haswell, Partner, Pinsent Masons in discussing some of the global and regional
trends taking place in the industry. Professor Xu Yan, Associate Dean of the
HKUST Business School, moderated.
The panelists also talked about
the important role of innovation as well as opportunities for new business
models and partnerships, and the role of the private and public sectors.
Using Globe Telecom as an
example, Navarrete explained how Kickstart, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Globe,
was created to break down barriers to disruptive innovation that could not
survive inside an established telecom company.
“Kickstart challenges existing
norms and takes active part in accelerating the development of robust
innovation ecosystem. Globe knows
that the world is changing and it’s not enough to only be in mobile because
people want to do different things.
It is important that we provide them with tools, channels, mentors and
market access. Globe has all these assets, but we also know that innovation has
to be moreswift, agile, and open to changing very, very fast, at a rate that a
large established corporation would be hard-pressed to achieve. That’s why Kickstart was born,” she
said.
Kickstart is an incubation and
investment company which helps tech startups operating in the Philippines to
build robust businesses and technical foundations, as well as to scale.
Kickstart does this by putting big company resources - capital, facilities,
expertise, and business connections - behind the startups that it funds so they
can launch faster and achieve scale and profitability sooner. These resources
are available to Kickstart through its parent company, Globe Telecom, and its
major shareholders, Ayala Corporation and Singtel.
According to Navarrete, large
enterprises are good at driving and scaling innovation through reliable,
repeatable processes but it is much less successful for the frontier areas of
industry where there are higher, often unquantifiable degrees of uncertainty
and risk.
Thus, Globe mandated Kickstart
to spur innovation by providing digital startup companies with capital,
mentorship, and market access to make it possible for large and small
corporations to work together.
“Innovation requires an
ecosystem approach: we must create an integrated innovation ecosystem in the
Philippines. The digital space is
interesting because it can be deployed very quickly and doesn’t need huge
capital, qualities that make it well-suited to starting in emerging markets,
and scaling to the world. We break
down barriers by giving startups the cash to help them reduce their risks and
start their entrepreneurial journey.
We build bridges by bringing in mentors and offering training that’s
very specific to their needs. We
bring in the people and the large private and public sector organizations who
can contribute,” she said.
Kickstart currently has 18
portfolio companies with product and services ranging from e-commerce, social
enterprise, crowd sourcing, prepaid credits, party invites, skills matching,
loans, online journal, clinic management, legal research, dating, bilingual
educational, carpooling, travel, real estate, management tool, and loyalty
promotions.
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