THE Philippines plans to copy the start-up ecosystem of Israel, according to an official of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).
“We wanted to have something new in the latest edition of Geeks on a Beach [Goab] to enrich the country’s digital start-up ecosystem. We want to learn from other countries how they developed their ecosystem,” DICT Undersecretary Monchito B. Ibrahim told the BusinessMirror. “Definitely, one of the leading if not the best digital start-up ecosystem in the whole world is the Israeli system. They supply the whole world with a lot of their innovation.”
Ibrahim spoke on the sidelines of the launching of the Goab, a conference of Information and communication technologies professionals supported by the DICT that aims “to harness the start-up community in helping fix the country’s problems.”
Ibrahim said the Israelis are also interested to work with their Philippine counterparts on how to develop the local start-up industry. “They were surprised to learn that we [have been] conducting this activity [Goab] for the past five years.”
Aside from educating the youth, Ibrahim said the DICT hopes to inspire them to pursue careers in science and technology and also engage in developing start-ups. “We need to develop local start-ups that can succeed in the global market for inspiration,” Ibrahim said.
Align Commerce Corp. Chief Technology Officer Aldo Carrascoso agreed, saying “the strong and promising potential for the Philippines to be a location for tech start-ups is ‘tremendous’ because of the talent pool.”