 So let me introduce myself. I've been here for a year. I'm from Malaysia. So in Malaysia, I was educated in Malaysian and English. So my Chinese is very weak. So I speak Chinese with my mother, my parents. They do speak some Dutch with me in Chinese, but in English. That's okay, I think I speak English. How can I help? Okay, so I was amazed, by the way, with the progress that might have been made in Taiwan since I was in Malaysia. I was teaching in US in Malaysia for many years and then at the time I was asked to do some research about S.E., social enterprise and one of the leading economies in building social enterprises, Taiwan and Asia. So I was like, perhaps, let me start with a general question here. What do you think about the success factor in Taiwan? Believing this, you know, the so-called ecosystem, creating up many startups, successful startups in Taiwan as some of these companies can lead some of the programs in which scale up and lead other countries to emulate the model team. So what is your ideal? Well, definitely, I think a strong civic sector, or a social sector as some people call it, is the number one reason no social entrepreneurship can succeed without a strong social sector as the wider community in Taiwan. Even before we had presidential election in 1996, there were already people doing community building, doing co-ops, doing all sort of philanthropic endeavors that then evolved into social entrepreneurship way before the 80s, actually they started late 70s, the community building phase. And so it's safe to say that the charities and co-ops and social enterprises in the 80s, they have a longer history and a building legitimacy. You come here to even the central government. People tend to trust, for example, the Homemakers Union. People tend to trust to see, people trust the Keras Foundation or their company, arguably more than the minister. And so that provides a fertile ground for people when they see a social issue. Instead of relying on the government to solve the problem, people would just start solving the problem by themselves and expect the government to support and control their endeavor. And of course after the democratization, this trend only continues. And so the central government, we always say, we can't beat the social sector, we must join the social sector. And that leads to, I think, the Asia's most free in terms of the rights, the freedom of speech, of assembly, and so on. And so that a minister's blood and a social entrepreneur's blood is equivalent. And if the social entrepreneur can mask a very large amount of following, they actually can create alternate, well-meaning mechanisms, such as the air box movement where people measure air quality by themselves as a classic social innovation that will then shape the ministry of environmental protections policy. And you can't say that for many Asian jurisdictions, because in these jurisdictions, if the legitimacy of a movement or mobilization starts to threaten the legitimacy of the central government, there's a little bit of censorship or control, but Taiwan, the sky is the limit. And so I think that also promotes the innovation to think in very broad terms, like an overview of national scale terms, instead of only our community terms, because in other jurisdictions, community terms are safer. Do you see a shift because, well, I know the term of Taiwan, and I read a lot from the book, it said that in the previous time, perhaps during the KMT time, it has a tendency to hire many technocrats and genius who know about industry, who know about manufacturing, to be recruited, to help the government, to do art weighting processes, to build mechanisms so that Taiwan can be a wealthy nation. Then, of course, after perhaps 1990s and more and more, people realized the importance of social enterprise, social innovation. What I see is that the government inviting many professionals for social advocates, civil social advocates, to participate in administrative activities. So is that a shift, would you say, from technocrats to social advocates? Well, I would say, it's not only about parties, but rather it is literally an earth-shattering event on September 21, that was made around the turn of century, in 1989. So during the recovery process of September 21, that was made, people start seeing that the government doesn't mobilize as well as the social sector. And the social sector actors build a newfound solidarity between charities that used to take care of different things, and also between the people who need to revitalize their community economy after being forcibly relocated by the earthquake. And they have to find, for example, the plums that was not a star product, became the star product of the saline village out of the earthquake, and that's a classic social entrepreneurship movement. And so they gained social solidarity, kind of, overnight. Because even when a family was in charge during the Mayans' earthquake, they still had a dedicated minister of the portfolio, Fung Yan Professor Fung, in charge of social entrepreneurship. So anything that happened after the earthquake, I think those major parties have to endorse this kind of social movement because they recognize its legitimacy as a potentially higher than a minister. So you do take that as a shift. There is a kind of, like, evolution. Yeah, we are getting a lot to Professor Fung Yan during her turn in the Mayans' earthquake to develop such an entrepreneurship vibe. So do you think that there's still, you know, new technocrats, you know, engineers from Silicon Valley and over here, to do competitive sectors? You can see that the economy is changing, right? It's less now about unicorns that shoot for growths that are exponential. There's social and environmental negative externality that are also exponential, right? Yeah. Silicon Valley is about purpose-led companies. It's about investment with a, at least not harming the social environment. So it's about carbon neutral or even negative carbon innovation that you could design. So basically, I think, as long as people think in a longer term, like sustainable growths, 10-year horizon, the for-profit sector and the with-profit social entrepreneurs tend to speak more common language as evidenced by, say, the E-Corp movement, which is a certificate that even Kickstarter wants to, you know, get a V-Labs certificate saying that we are a triple of them all and things like that. So even Silicon Valley is changing. So while we do, of course, do a talent circulation plan to try to get people overseas to consider Taiwan a perfect home, not only against coronavirus, but also a really good place to get a, what we call a good card to start your M-100 plus here. Not necessarily to be hired by someone. So these are all, I think, complementary. Not really. So this co-optition, like competition, competing to solve a global problem, I think that is a shared value, both by the industrial innovation sectors and the digital innovation sectors. Because to me, some people will see that there is a saturated sector where one focus in competitive industrial activities, like, you know, doing inventions, do patents, do smart phone, produce smart phone, while the other one's social enterprise are focusing more on solving societal problems. So do you see that as a platform? Do you see that you need a time to see that? Because in Taiwan, our unicorns, such as Global Role, they're, of course, very competitive. And of course, for each group, which is a brand new field of industry, there's a lot of inventors as well. But at its core, Global Role is a renewable energy storage company. It's basically reshaping not only about reducing emissions, but also a more efficient way to solve the energy problem. And so I think they see themselves as having an environmental purpose alongside their social and economic purposes and their investors investing in them, not only because, you know, of the ROI, but also because of the social return. And so I think that Taiwanese companies, because they know that the social sector always holds this ultimate weapon of social sanction. If you are a very profitable company, but somehow people show that you cause environmental or social harm, the consumer's social sanction is very strong, I want. And the entire brand can dissipate or not because of social sanction. So even now they're still interested if they consider how one of their main markets they will do things that are reconsidered as a sustainable or risk profit or purpose plan. Let's see... seeing themselves dependent on the government for firm and government assistance. That's what I think, sir. You're like a guru yourself, like, yep, the product is very, very excellent. But would you see that there's still need down to, you know, facilitate the process of start purchasing, you know, go worldwide so that they will consume, like, they will demand, like, need without the system of subsidies, you know, from the government, would you see that they can compete to that of, yeah, the industrial... Well, there's subsidy that might be declining, right? So at the very beginning, we do offer subsidies in the effort to reduce air pollution. But I mean, non-electric, ordinary scooters if they operate their engine, they can also significantly cut emissions. So our subsidies is about cutting emissions. It's not about we think only luxury or ticket subsidy. If you get a sufficiently advanced zero or near zero emission engine, then you also get the same subsidy. So I don't think it's particular to global. But it is appropriate to reduce emissions. But that is actually just making sure that the external cost is re-internalized to those which are commonly done close to the environmental harm, right? So I don't think this is a subsidy. I think of it as a, you know, externalization, re-internalizing economic force. But it's easier to explain as a subsidy. But would it be easy for them to compete in the international market? Like, for example, you have some sort of, you know, big conglomerate that can scale up any product easily while we say, for example, you know, Google has to be able to see self-compactity beyond the finance market. Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, China, right? It's a business question, right? Yeah. I think the global mainly sells on design. So, and I used to work with Apple for six years with the Siri team. We, at Apple, we always understood that designers are closest to the people. And if we design those people's needs in mind, then it's not about cost now. Apple is not known for very cheap. But rather it's about co-evolving the economy of the society. And that also speaks to social entrepreneurship in general because if the social enterprise doesn't consult with the stakeholders and let stakeholders be the co-creators, then they can only be social entrepreneurship for so long. And so the society shifts, and they're not very social anymore. So I think this ongoing dialogue is one of the main points that we're promising as part of our social innovation plan and the organization that do it well, make a bigger co-op or company or whatever, perform better internationally. But the companies that don't do this invest mostly in R&D and things like that and may actually fail to detect the next wave of the society. I see, I see. So there are real issues of scaling up in Taiwan's ecosystem. Right. In which if there's a such... It's about scaling deeply. Like making sure that all the vitals are essentially co-creators and their ideas are taking into account into the next phase of product and so on and things like that. When you say all vitals become the co-creators, what do you mean by that? I mean, in many social enterprises, for example in the B-Lab scorecard, there is one access that asks if you're a buyer or if you're people on your supply chain and things like that have a good idea about how you operate, how quickly can you integrate those innovations from your stakeholder crowd into your R&D process and just realize a lot of course consultations online about the feedback forms that they provide their app, their service centers where you can just chime in with your new ideas and of course beta testing and things like that and all of these are just standard what we call agile development where we deliver a most perfect product, get people upset about you're still upset they can suggest new ideas and we say oh, your new idea become our product within a week or two. So the more iterative the process, the shorter the feedback loop, the more sociable I think it is in the process. What about the smaller one? Of course Gokoro is based on a smaller S&E in the face of difficult issues that perhaps finding yourself trapped in both getting the investments on the other hand, getting more interested consumers to buy their products or buy their services but we just see that. So on the very stage S&E is nowadays a reliant problem and so if there is no demand well they just don't do the product it's basically a way to externalize the risk if people are willing to pay for a board game or something like that you know already that there is a set of people who want to engage with you very early on even before they see the product and Taiwan of course also has subscription based cross funding model also equity based cross funding model so you can provide extra incentives to the extra value subscribers that essentially make them share orders that's a possibility to you and so what I'm trying to say is that if you design the incentive mechanism just right you can put it quite a few times each time understanding that it's not a good market fit until you find something that really is a market fit and people are very tolerant of the teams that try a few times the cross funding and not very successful of each way until you find something that really matters to you I see but in the textbooks in the management textbooks there is a lot of investment in terms of investing technology that is seen as short cycle and seen as long cycle short cycle as you mentioned in responding to market demand there is a lot of technology that can benefit us in long run 10 years and then of course there is no demand for now but it has a potential in the next 5 to 10 years would then be a space for entrepreneur to aim for a long cycle very much so there is no way they can, as you said people the changes the demand you know that's where the sustainability goals come to play because these are things that people agree to reach 10 years from now but it doesn't say how someone has an idea he or she has an idea it can be good but there is no existing demand but then demand can exist when you create something like how much we can produce can be that long so would that be a ground for entrepreneur to aim for a long cycle nowadays nowadays we ask them if they have such a money shock idea to aim for solving one specific sustainable goal so not one of the 17 I rather one of the 169 and if they can pinpoint to that particular goal we actually do a lot of information right here we provide the office space for free we provide wifi and matchmaking for free so that they can learn about what the ecosystem is and basically we absorb a lot of the R&D cost for them and they don't have to succeed they can just fail openly and if they fail openly they provide something for other people to learn as well so this is the open innovation ecosystem and so if they need a testing field here is the sandbox mechanism if they need presidential buy-in there is a presidential hackathon if they need a local government or municipal test ground we have the social innovation towards and all of these and big office hours like today so all of these are mechanisms through which those money shots can find like-minded people to make a presidential return within the next year but rather it was a shared purpose with a single system of as a common focus they can just be partners alongside the way and if one of them fail publicly everybody learns would you think that what is the new term for SROI, a social investment a magic to be used by the government to pay but the council of agriculture already there will be advantage to evaluate they already do that so if you look for I'm trying to think of is there a robot measure measuring for a few years is robustish so the soil and water conservation burial should do for that in SROI you will see how it funds and how it do this kind of multi-stakeholder measurement to calculate the SROI and then calculate it correctly as something on one it's a ratio, it's not a KBI they do that very well and so I encourage you to look into the council of agriculture currently in the SROI so we see one for ASCII which we see for for social enterprises specialized we see for specialized we see for so for example there is what they call a SHOFO or SHOFEI so the current impact investment is one that investors they invest only with businesses that are profitless and they already have 6 SDGs in their focus and there's many portfolio companies that have already grown to be pretty good like the green lines the new company are I wouldn't say household names but they're kind of visible the plum after the earthquake even in WAN Gatelow and Trump these are also very successful portfolio in their investment so we can look at the current Asia the current of Asia it is a very portfolio we see that entrepreneurs in IK or Cintas are more organized and capable in other cities because my students was asking me to tour around I want to see at least a social entrepreneur for different reasons so we'll just see that those that are less of an area they solve different problems I see so there is no priority to be given to people here so equally a budget like if you want to stop such a problem a preferred toolset is smart machinery then it makes sense to fund Europe's social entrepreneurship because that's the cluster of smart machinery and so depending on how your supply chain looks like you would want to be based in the place and for example there was a the blue seeds which is also kind of famous you can find in their products and what they do is that it works with indigenous lands to make like avida like products for self care and things like that and they work with indigenous design they use the kind of farming that restores the liability of the land and of course they will have to build Taigong because that's where this kind of zero chemical and indigenous lands and things like that is at so they of course have to work in Taigong would that be a special location for those working at the river area from the belt perspective we tour around Taigong and then give such teleconference conversations and anyone who wants to sit or even within their municipality can just connect to this video number for what we do and so there is Taigong and Taigong as the two main eastern centers and there's also the ones in Taigong and Taigong and Taigong and Taigong so you have office everywhere that's right, but wherever we do it everybody joins so do government have special location just to be honest because those living at Taigong may not see them at one page position because people in Taigong have definitely access to network, medical partners and so on they are well articulated but those living at different regions in Taiwan may see them so it's a part of this we make an effort to run our social enterprise and I think we'll submit outside Taigong so a year ago we run the summit in Baoshan and the year before that was in Taigong and so I think it's very important to show people in different municipalities to ask there's just different specialties different coaches even in medical systems so what years ago better was it depends on which culture you associated yourself with that's actually the core of such entrepreneurship is about building approach sharing so I think I totally agree that we need to emphasize non Taipei points and there are existing microquadding I don't dedicate funding financing for indigenous lands and we do work very closely with the council for indigenous fans as well as the Guantanamo people those reporters are helping the local people we just see that they're able to scale up and whatever solutions they create they can export for example the blue seeds more than working with indigenous people in Taigong they not only export their products to say Vancouver they actually export your mechanism so that the native people, the indigenous people in Canada who about the same time as Taiwan actually they're building a new identity their traditional justice process they did a few years before and now they're a semi-diplomatic relationship with the Canadian government and so they also want in cultural identity building process where they can re-identify with the traditional plants that they grow but promote them through marketing channels like Aida as a luxury brand instead of something that you help indigenous people with is the indigenous wisdom telling you and so I think the social innovation mechanism actually spreads faster than individual products you mentioned this company called City Love right? and this kind of model so this model is able to scale up people's ideas and export in New Zealand I was always in New Zealand in New Zealand and the New Zealand people love that as well there's a lot of cultural similarity between New Zealand and Taiwan both are islands and those are like absolutely free they are encountering the virus pretty well there's a lot of similarities and in our bilateral agreement there's a special track about culture including indigenous culture and so yeah that's one of our value allies but there's many others as well S.E. wrote in health care would that play an important role in this? they do they do say important information especially when doing this yeah what is their role in helping the society so there is for example the previous deputy mayor of Taekjong being was a very important social entrepreneurship when it comes to the aging care of the Hong Kong Foundation and I think she and this idea of bringing social entrepreneurs as re-branding how long-term health care and care for the aging lex because in the long-term health care 2.0 the idea is that there's a so-called C class C sentence which is just everywhere like grocery stores and things like this within walking distance by social entrepreneurship specializing in for example running a cafe and the cafe is designed to be very friendly to the elderly but the people who participate in the long-term health care the most young people who want to devote their career into walking the care first phase of the system for their family because their family doesn't see care for the elderly people as a career as a group ladder and so they've been mayor at a time where young exchange program was Japan who has a lot of medical technologies to learn and they can also learn more in English and also get a national certificate and once they're back in Taiwan they are a cafe owner they can design their own ambience and have a career ladder they can even get an MBA or something and then their parents are much more comfortable people in themselves into the long-term care economy so what I'm trying to say is that social entrepreneurship spans a lot of things but especially around the generation of elderly it shows that elderly people are not just here to be thinking here of at least the right design of your creation the elderly people's wisdom can also be put into a social enterprise as for example their stories or their cultural artifacts which is the fact that they want to talk about their life over coffee with you that could provide a local learning center as well perhaps I go to the last two places you'll do about Southeast Asia generally about the needs of social entrepreneurship what would you do about in general Southeast Asia model I think the greater East Asia region is the future maybe because more people will be born there in the future actually the diagnosis is that what I believe is transculturalism meaning that in Taiwan it was a very long time where there is only one national language and there may be progress from the technocrats that you mentioned yet a cost of handling of other cultures and other languages and this is a very important fact but nowadays we have 20 national languages including the sign language so you can see this there's always a sign language and so we're becoming much more inclusive and people around Taiwan can choose to learn their basic education and here very soon it's going to be required to learn their mother tongue including of course people, children of new immigrants most of them from East Asian countries and so we're quickly becoming a transcultural republic and that I think is Taiwan's future but in a certain sense many East Asian countries are already there and you're already much more of a transcultural we see some people who have some what was some conservative minded people who have some financial power to accept these so-called movements to transform cultures I think it's definitely a decision even a very simple thing saying we can start immersing kindergarten in English a simple thing is that needs resistance and thus arguably easier in East Asian countries if you decide to have a bilingual kindergarten with your mother tongue and English the scene is something abnormal in most East Asian Southeast Asian countries but somehow in Taiwan it needs resistance and not there I do see there's a conflict too Taiwan is married Southeast Asian partners and then you see there all the time issues and then they can die walls there are many other things because of this mismatch a lot of people feel uncomfortable if the new immigrants speak their mother tongue and English better than their grandparents who speak Mandarin and Taiwanese or Hakata but I think this can be ameliorated by more generation of solidarity essentially like grandparents talking to their children more or the other way around which is one part of our new curriculum is for the children to learn more from their local community rather than strictly from textbooks and so I think it will take time but it will heal and I'm quite optimistic Can the immigrant play a role in social enterprise many of them are blue collar workers and can articulate well both in English or in Chinese but they may have good ideas they may be able to solve many problems that they use I mean many solutions that they use in the whole country they can break it in half communication standard private interaction is a social enterprise for 140 they do that a lot so the name comes from when they were founded migrant workers implies 140 families of relations so that's their name and of course what they're doing is not only empowering the migrant workers but they impart them with a aim that they can be like cultural investments so when they finish their migrant workers and go back to their home country they may I didn't start to think pursuing their career but also bring some of the know-hows how to operate social enterprises such as 140 themselves did back to their home country so it's kind of like a education center plus incubator and I strongly encourage you to reach out to them they have a very good connection to the migrant workers so which country in such a case is not a thing about but it's a self-op policy which country will provide a lot of persistence and learning opportunity for Taiwan and it's helpful because I can see that there's some sort of like a tendency to work more closely with people in Ireland and somehow I didn't see much effort being made to interact I'll communicate with people in India or perhaps people in Indonesia so this is just my perception is that true? No I think we are very active in all their countries it's just that they have different points of impact and some focus as we said about the empowerment of migrant workers and things like that but there's some in Asian countries that focus more on agriculture and sustainable agriculture economy and of course New Zealand is in its own past and they care a lot about environmental protection but also about technology filmmaking and project and things like that so each country has its own focus and we work with them on different platforms such as the global cooperation training program or the GCPF and so I think it's very clear that we need to be working with the countries on their terms When you talk about sustainable agriculture that one is also input high tech the use of high tech in agriculture like precision counting and detection of agricultural issues using drones like that is something that happens very well But many poor countries in Southeast Asia may not have money to buy all this high tech Well on the other hand drones are very cheap now so they can take care of a huge pineapple field and counting the pineapples of spraying the necessary timing post without overspraying which is one of the issues that leads to unsustainable agriculture and so the cost is low enough I think that people are starting to express the interest and especially if there are open innovation in the sense that local people can appropriate the technology into appropriate technologies that fits their own interests Exactly We have an air box, water box, whatever they are all open to the print so you don't have to pay a license fee or anything you can just bring in working prototype back and then everything after that is just open innovation I see Would that make Taiwan give up a lot but can you see much of that But that's how we process innovation so we don't have to innovate everything ourselves so if people take our idea and make improvements when they get the product then we also copy and paste We are very good at copying that So you think that happens I think along the newsroom and in the near future would you take the idea? Very much so because the IP is not just for protection it's also for sharing if you don't have a root culture about what we call creating commons then the sharing is just by making improvements You can copy a Microsoft Windows certainly you would not write an email to Microsoft saying hey I just copy if you are a Windows software but with creative commons with innovation like Wikipedia people who remix Wikipedia or who make their new products and so on they do actually contribute their fixes even just fixing one type of because they have a good circulation of creative commons So Taiwan is striking with all the orders talking about 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 That's because in the semiconductor industry it's not about new ideas it's about execution Execution is the main thing that differentiates TSMC with everybody else but in such entrepreneurship it's more about finding the fit with the society and so it necessarily has to adapt when it comes to an exciting Because every time I come back to Korea in Taiwan it was once more equally good I'm seeing a patent actually it's not going up but recently we see that what we see is that Korea is still going up but we see that a declining trend beyond the case of Taiwan So you can only compare patterns in the final era I think the WEF including patterns a lot of other innovation criteria that's why the World Economic Forum that went into the top four supreme invaders for two years they look at a multitude of metrics but I think Korea is also doing very well I think there are many times I really respect them but for social entrepreneurship they basically have a more municipal environmental focus they have an attack that's specifically for most certain kinds of social entrepreneurship around social welfare and empowerment which is great but in Taiwan such innovation came from the grassroots from this huge swarm of misnemies and the misnemies are extremely agile and bring out new innovations without even waiting for to get your patterns they don't even bother just like fashion if it goes out of fashion you don't have to so I think it is the agility that is the background of the talent and the innovation I am very grateful that Korea has shown a different story of such entrepreneurship they are also doing very well thank you very much thank you so Jeff in Professor Du we write books and when we write books we make students to read it so I have two books if you don't mind accepting some things more this is a Malaysia this is a Malaysia innovations in the city context the other one is about agriculture so thank you very much I hope that we can to be touched thank you see you