 JCI JAPAN NO MINASAN ISHOU NI DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION GANBARIMASHA, DIGITAL FORUM DE O AISHIMASHA. I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to share some thoughts around digital transformation. Question 1. As one of the common points between Taiwan and Japan is that we have many small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, please tell how those SMEs' owners in Taiwan introduce digital into their management. IT connects machine to machines. Digital connects people to people. In the time of the pandemic, during the alertness level 3 in Taiwan, we have seen many successful attempts to transform the business models from that of, for example, food makers in a night market with the people that frequent their food stand, translating that into a digital experience of a digital double of the night market where people can serve and buy online. And the night market owners band together with multi-purpose taxi drivers, such as the line taxi in Gaoxiong City and now in other municipalities as well to deliver such food to people's homes. This group effort orchestrated by the municipalities of Gaoxiong and our other city governments proved that people will want to connect to one another even during the time of the pandemic and that people care about the people that they frequently see in the night market and so on and use online as a way to keep connected to the food stand owners as well as the multi-purpose taxi drivers. Now the multi-purpose taxi law itself is such a crowdsourced effort as well from SMEs. You see, back in 2015 when UberX first came to Taiwan, there are many local fleets serving the local communities, temples, churches, and so on also want to benefit from this new way of app-based dispatch. So because of this, we run an open consultation method online. In 3 weeks time, people resonated with one another's feelings and the good enough consensus is then held as agenda for live-streamed multi-stakeholder conversation. The upshot is that we have legalized not just UberX into the local Q taxi fleet but also Line Taxi and other multi-purpose taxi fleets are given legal status without requiring them to be painted yellow without requiring them to be held on the street as long as they fulfill the same registration, not undercutting existing meters, and insurance duties can serve the local community need with a much more flexible business model. And so if the law do not anticipate new innovations, we adopt such a way that we call regulatory sandbox since 2018. So it's not just transportation like self-driving vehicles, nor is it just about fintech or about healthcare. Anything, well anything that's not money laundering or funding terrorism, pretty much anything can be challenged using such a general purpose sandbox and given half a year or a year to experiment locally. If the people like it and form a good enough consensus, then this SME-driven innovation is given legal status and made into a new law or regulation. And so this style of open innovation for the public good combined the inventiveness of the SME community as well as the legitimacy of the local municipality and escalating eventually into the central government, into regulations or even new laws. Question two, please tell us if there are any examples of digital transformation unique to SMEs in Taiwan. In Taiwan, we have introduced the 3T or talent transformation and training program to help the SMEs to digitally transform with the freshly graduated young people. You see these young people who are freshly graduated, they do not serve as interns or low level employees for these SMEs. Where they are given a course in digital transformation for a few weeks in large teams that has already successfully transformed the sectors that the young people likes to transform. And after this training, they were sent into the groups of five for six months of reverse mentorship with existing SME communities. As previously, the SMEs had little reason to engage these young people as mentors or consultants. But it is my observation that these young people with a fresh eye of a digital native lifestyle actually carries a lot of potential in design thinking and computational thinking and discovering new ways to transform existing business models. And so this is an excellent chance for them to co-create, to learn from one another rather than one side listening to the other and not sharing what they have in mind. This is both sides, both the younger people and the existing SME communities taking turns leading one another and co-creating new business models together. If you're interested in that program, please check out 3t.org.tw and see the existing programs. I do believe that this is one of the most important ways to build intergenerational solidarity as well as to promote the idea that we are co-creators, not employees and employers in the path of digital transformation. Question three, what is the most important point that I think for SMEs to realize digital transformation? Well, as a digital minister and digital connects people to people, I make sure that my work reduce the risk and makes more time for people to spend time with others. That is to say, the time saving and risk reducing nature are the most important KPIs when it comes to digital transformation. Especially for SMEs who do not have a lot of extra budget to spend to invest on expensive digital transformation programs, including software or hardware, what's the most important is that you get a set of tried and true processes that can just save a little bit of time or reduce a little bit of risk, but they must not increase risk while saving time or waste your time while reducing risk. These two need to be taken care simultaneously. And the idea of voluntary association of the customers and other stakeholders in your neighborhood, if you open up your R&D process, your research and development can be crowdsourced or even crowdfunded and turning what's previously just consumers into co-creators with you. And the idea on the digital platforms can be tried out in parallel. So if you have a good idea, you can start quite a few different variations and include one idea in each crowdfunding or crowdsourcing project and the ones that attract more people could eventually become your new product or service line and the ones that do not attract such involvement from the stakeholder community. Well, then there's no harm done. You'll understand that it's not what the market wants. And so experiment more, experiment in the open, experiment with the stakeholders, not just for the stakeholders. I believe that is the most important thing when it comes for SMEs digital transformation. Question 4, please tell us what you value in education in Taiwan. As you probably know, I dropped out of the high school when I was 14 years old because I encountered this thing called the World Wide Web. On the World Wide Web, I see knowledge as something that people are making together rather than being dispensed vertically. So previously in the school system that I attended, there's this relationship that teacher holds the standardized answer and therefore holding the power over the students. However, on the World Wide Web, I discovered that on the edge of the cutting edge of knowledge making, people entertain a lot of different ideas together. There's no right answer when you're doing research. There's just this community of people who are trying a lot of different ways to tackle something of common interest. And so it turns the standardized test regime where each individual compete for higher score into a collaborative setting where everybody can add some piece of the puzzle into the common research platform. And that's when I told the head of my school, Du Heiping, I told the principal that I don't want to attend the school anymore because I'm more interested in creating knowledge, not in memorizing knowledge. And she graciously accepted and told me that I don't have to go to her school anymore tomorrow. So because of that, I engaged full time in the World Wide Web community where we're all just contributors. Everyone are just identified by their contributions and not by the type or class or ethnicity or other labels. And there's always a mechanism to form a good enough consensus in the community. So there are competitions, but these are not between individual and individual. Rather, it's the competition between one group advancing a solution and another group advancing a different solution to the same problem. So if one solution turns out to be a better one, well, the group that lost still gained by having that problem solved. And they can also join the group that actually created the right solution. And so because of that, on the World Wide Web, I see it as a primarily collaborative place and not an individual to individual competitive place. And so in 2019, we took that spirit into our basic education curriculum. So we replaced the old ideas of just literacy, which is more about consumers of media, of digital, of standardized answers. We turned that into an idea of education based on competence, meaning that people are makers and producers of media, of digital, of data, and so on. And so it's a huge break from the traditional East Asian way of thinking about education of specific skills and specialization and things like that. But in the new curriculum, we understand we cannot predict the world 12 years from now. The world needs to be shaped by the people within the basic education curriculum, both the local schools, but also the school students. Eventually, each specific discipline may merge into another one or get transformed radically. So that means the teacher, instead of memorizing the standardized answers, must now become a co-learner with the students. And so, well, it doesn't work anyway now in teleeducation because over the internet, over a teleconference screen, it's rather difficult to assume a top-down way of classroom management, as many teachers are now discovering, and so the teachers, by losing control, actually gains solidarity and gains co-creativity with the students. Question five, please tell us about the programming education efforts in Taiwan. In Taiwan, as I mentioned, we have this idea of information and media competence, the point being able to contribute to the common sense-making. For example, people who want to contribute to climate science, even in primary schools, they can set up air boxes to measure the nearby air pollution as well as other metrics and contribute it to a distributed ledger. Now, in such an effort with tens of thousands of air boxes around the island, not only do we get the idea of data stewardship intuitively for the students to learn, but also we make sure that everyone sees any common issue in the society as something they can contribute, not waiting for someone else to solve. The same applies also to media competence. We have many primary schoolers, middle schoolers. Fact-checking are three presidential candidates in the previous presidential election, in conjunction with professional journalists and people on the social media. They want to put more contextualization service around each piece of information so people don't get misled by partial or biased or conspiracy theory information that much. Again, even primary schoolers can contribute meaningfully to this fact-checking community and to the media competence programs. And so we think of these ideas of competencies not as checkmarks, not as something that people just complete as part of the course, but rather it's like a capstone project that makes something meaningful from the point of view of that student. And the student will then learn the necessary skill sets for this capstone project to happen. So I think competence maker and producer-based education absolutely is the best way forward when we're making sure that the people care about the civics, care about democracy as a very young child. They could care about their community much more early on rather than requiring them to be an adult to vote or take part in democratic process. Anyone as young as 12 years old or 14 years old understand they can help set the agenda for democratic discourse, not just for their local community, but also through the joint platform and other platforms on national level as well. Question 6. Please tell us about the education and skills required for the digital society in the future. We have three fundamental competencies in our basic education and these are autonomy, interaction, and the common good. Autonomy means that one is driven by intrinsic curiosity. When an emergent situation comes, when there's no precedent, no previous experience of anything like it, like the structural issues we're facing now, the infodamic, the pandemic, and so on, people with good autonomy competence see it as an opportunity to learn something new. The immediate intrinsic feeling is that of curiosity, responding to new situations with novel ideas, with new techniques. Interaction means to talk and listen across different disciplines, different backgrounds, different cultures, different generations, and so on. So it means that being at peace with people who are different from you, so that we can learn from one another, not just learning from the people who think like us. And that brings us to the third competence of the common good. The common good means that, despite our initially different positions, there is always something in common for us to build upon. For example, the idea of sustainability, that we need to prosper for this generation, but making sure that the next generations prosper even more, to become good enough ancestors. These are those potent common values that despite the differences in culture, in different civilizations, in different disciplines, people do share these common good. So the common good unifies our interactions, so that our individual autonomy and curiosity become something larger, greater than ourselves, so that when faced with structural problems, we're not afraid to both listen to other people with very different positions and experiences, and not afraid to contribute what we have to see and what we have to say. Question 7. Please tell us the necessity of digital identities and the points to promote the spread of digitalization of societies. In the current counter-pandemic discussion, we're very much thankful for the adoption of IC-based health insurance cards in Taiwan in 2004. You see, in 2003, when SARS first hit Taiwan, only on the Pescadores, the Penghu Island, do we had the pilot of the IC-based health card. Everybody else on the main islands of Taiwan still only held those paper-based health cards. What a difference that makes. A IC-based health card not only streamlines the access to medical and health services, but also creates a way for people to rapidly self-service in, for example, the kiosks or the vending machines for medical grade masks and so on, people could authenticate easily using their IC-based health card and rest assured that it would never be used for advertisement or other commercial purposes because we have the Health Act prescribing that anything on the health card can only be used for public service and any public service agency that wish to make such a use must first register with the National Health Administration. So the National Health Insurance System may show not just citizens, but also residents are included in this ID system. So even for immigrant workers or people who are just born, like 10 days after someone is born, they're guaranteed to have a IC-based health card so that they can access universal health care regardless of their background, economic situation and things like that. And so I do believe this is one of the keys that Taiwan has been able to utilize so quickly for anything ranging from the testing, vaccination, mask arrangement and things like that during the pandemic. Question eight, please tell us how digital IDs are used in Taiwan. So as I mentioned, we already have the digital ID since 2003 and that is our national health card. But when people are teleconferencing, when you're doing telehealth or having a conversation with a psychotherapist over the internet, of course that is still covered by the National Health Insurance as of this year. We do cover the telehealth, but the card reader is not that easy to do across the screen. So we have made an app, the NHI Express app, National Health Insurance app, so that one, instead of using a IC-based card, one can register that card into an app, authenticating either using a card reader or using a phone number that belongs to one's own name. And so in either SIM-based or card reader-based authentication, the app on your mobile phone is then equivalent to the National Health Card. So you can already make new dynamic QR codes on that app and just scanning it across the screen is the same equivalent effect as swiping the card on the card reader physically. And so that opened the doors to telemedicine, telehealthcare, and so on. And it is now being piloted in many different municipalities and cities in Taiwan and we look forward to completely open the access for QR-based national healthcare sometime around end of this year or early next year. Question nine, what role do you think that non-government organizations or NGOs should do for promoting digital transformation in the society? In Taiwan, we say the social sector. So not the voluntary sector, not the third sector, but the social sector. The social sector, just like the private sector that produce the goods and services or the public sector that produce the rules and regulations, the social sector produce social norms. That is to say, the social sector organization is responsible whenever a new situation comes to set what is the socially accepted way to respond to that crisis or to respond to that novel situation. In Taiwan, for example, the use of a map to visualize the availability of masks in pharmacies is prototyped in the social sector. It's not the government's idea. It's not the business idea. It's the people in the zero or G zero V community co-creating that norm. Similarly, for example, when we're doing the SMS-based check-ins, anyone on the outside of a venue nowadays can send a toll-free number to 192 simply by scanning the QR code and pressing send. There's nothing to type. There's nothing, no app to install. The built-in camera or the built-in scanner from the line application all serve as perfectly good scanners for QR-based SMS check-in code. Now, the creation of such norms, again, does no start from the government or the businesses. It's in the G zero community where many people who invent contact tracing methods as well as checking systems band together to figure out a open standard, in this case, the SMS standard. And the government then take the idea, amplify it so that everybody can enroll for free and then work with the telecom providers to ensure a stable delivery on such SMS-based messages. And so in a nutshell, this is the people-public-private partnership in which everyone's business gets everyone's help. So such social innovations makes sure that people can spontaneously invest and participate in new designs to change the relationships between different groups in the society to find solutions for the common problems. So this kind of blurs the boundaries between the three sectors of the social and public and private sectors. On the other hand, this allows people to more freely move between their assigned roles in the society in the co-creation of novel social innovations. Question 10, in Taiwan, digital investments such as the introduction of 5G is being promoted not just from cities but starting from rural areas. Please tell us the reasons for it. In Taiwan, as I mentioned, universal healthcare is a human right, but so is universal broadband access. Because it's a human right-based approach, this is not just about cost-effectiveness, it's not the end goal. We need to design innovations such as auctioning of the spectrum, previously in 4G and now in 5G, to make sure that the telecom operators put in extra money into places with a lower resource. And such innovations may not initially make a sense in capitalist fashion, but we make sure that through this auction strategy, they're incentivized to start, especially millimeter, but also subsets 5G deployment to fulfill the local needs of the rural places. As I mentioned, telemedicine, telelearning, healthcare and such are the requirements of such remote and rural places. It's not just nice to have, sometimes it's a must-have. And so because of that, even before we figure out what has a good return of investment, we can already figure out what ideas has a good social return of investment or SROI. And so the more rural, the more remote these places are, I think the more need there is for such a case of the low-latency delivery of the feeling of co-presence when it comes to access to healthcare and education. And so while it makes sense, of course, for this prototype to begin, more local fashion or through regulatory sandboxes on a municipal level, eventually they get escalated and amplified on the central government level. Every year, we have an annual presidential hackathon where such local ideas that have been prototyping for three months, five of those teams win a trophy and the trophy from the president is like from Star Wars. It's a projector. When you turn it on, it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, handing the trophy to you and promising whatever you did locally will become public policy on the national level, usually within a year. So if you're interested in the previous ideas that got promoted from the more rural places, more local places into national level, feel free to check out website of our presidential hackathon. Question 11. This year, JCI Japan find value typical of each region and disseminated as qualitative value. Please tell us how we should utilize digital to make best use of the characteristics of each region. I believe we do share a common language, at least for the next 10 years or so, as the sustainable development goals or SDGs. The presidential hackathon I just mentioned is structured in 169 targets, each corresponding to one specific SDG target. It includes social value, environmental value, and of course, business value. In our experience, this shared vocabulary makes sure that it makes communication between the sectors very easy. When I say that my hackathon case is achieving a specific SDG target number, then everybody else, even internationally, understand exactly what I'm talking about. We also ensure that the local and rural places if they have social innovation teams tackling one or more of the SDG targets as published in the social innovation map on si.taiwan.gov.tw. And from there, we combine them with the international links in the Asia-Pacific region through building partnerships like the Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award. We make sure that those local qualitative values find international counterparts and then link them together so that they can share their experiences and also build a common partnership network. And so we also held this annual Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Summit to combine in a hybrid setting face-to-face gathering of the social innovators in the Asia-Pacific region. And this year is called Invest Asia. It's called for more purpose-led and purpose-driven investment that is somewhat risky but still worth pursuing for even if it doesn't achieve a high return of investment financially, it can still help the local environment and society. And with that, the local municipalities, the local township are much more willing to help them to get loans, to get investment and so on and also to bridge the local resources of regional revitalization with such purpose-driven businesses. And so I do wish that we can continue to share the vocabulary of sustainable development goals and thank you for the great questions. I wish you all live long and prosper.