The program belongs to the project "Promoting innovation of youth and community for sustainable urban development" which is being piloted in Tam Ky city and Hoi An, then will be expanded to the whole province and other provinces and cities.

Need core foundations

Ms. Vo Thi Thao Trang - member of the Que Son Community Learning Space Coordination Group said that in 2022, in order to narrow the gap in learning environment and quality between rural and urban students, a group of young people in Que Son town established a community learning project.

The project is supported by Que Son District Youth Union and Dong Phu Town People's Committee to provide living space, storage of learning tools and more than 6,000 diverse books for students to access new knowledge.

This is a community education project, free of charge for participants. Students will experience the same learning program as the centers in the city, through experiential activities such as workshops - sharing, discussing a certain topic, traveling, visiting real places or participating in small courses to improve soft skills, enhance the internal capacity of each individual.

Over the past time, the project has received positive feedback from many students and parents because of its diverse, interesting and completely new activities in the rural educational environment.

“However, as a non-profit project, maintaining funding is a huge challenge. Despite being sponsored by many organizations and units, the financial situation is not stable. In addition, the project does not have legal status, so it is difficult for the initial founding members to find successors to continue maintaining and developing the project,” said Ms. Trang.

Sharing the same opinion with Ms. Trang, Mr. Nguyen Duy Hoa (founder of a successful innovative startup project in growing red artichokes in Bac Tra My district) said that his project is new and high-risk, but even if successful, it is difficult to replicate and develop because it lacks core foundations.

Specifically, for an innovation project to develop, Mr. Hoa believes that many resources are needed in terms of operating space, finance and operating personnel.

Like his red artichoke project, he needs land to organize large-scale production to provide enough raw materials. He himself is an agricultural worker, so other expertise such as market development will be difficult, but in mountainous areas like Bac Tra My, it is difficult to find personnel for this field.

Create an innovation map

Not only the two projects mentioned above encountered some problems related to finance, human resources, and production space, but most of the innovation projects participating in the workshop were also like that.

There are projects that are still in the idea stage, such as Ms. Alang Thi Cong (Dong Giang district) with the desire to create a project to develop sustainable livelihoods from forests to preserve the natural ecosystem or the project to produce recycled mesh bags from fishing nets of the people of Echotech Digital Technology Joint Stock Company... and many other good projects, oriented towards the community, introduced by the guests of the workshop.

Mr. Vo Nguyen Anh Duy - member of the Innovation Research Expert Group of UN-Habitat Vietnam said that the workshop with the theme "Accelerating Innovation: Exploring Needs and Opportunities in Quang Nam" aims to support innovative production solutions for projects in the province.

The program fully recorded the ideas, implementation process, competitive strengths, challenges and grasped the proposals and recommendations of innovation projects.

With this information, the research team will synthesize and create a Quang Nam-specific innovation map, projects will grasp each other's problems to support each other in overcoming difficulties and challenges. In addition, it is possible to connect with existing relationships to find investors or cross-consumer products for each other.

“In addition, collecting information from our innovation projects is one of the first steps to assess the real needs of innovation projects, from which we can find solutions, recommendations, and create topics for upcoming workshops on promoting innovation with the People's Committee of Quang Nam province.

Furthermore, it is possible to build an innovation space in the province, pilot a number of projects to help limit the difficulties and challenges that the projects are facing, and at the same time provide lessons for the development of the innovation ecosystem of Tam Ky City and Hoi An City in particular as well as Quang Nam in general" - Mr. Duy said.

At the workshop, the research team of UN-Habitat Vietnam also conducted a survey on a scientific research scale for innovation projects to assess project owners' perceptions of innovation and the project implementation process.

It is known that in Hoi An City, UN-Habitat Vietnam also organized a similar workshop. All information and recommendations will be compiled into practical documents for the workshop on promoting innovation development with the Provincial People's Committee, scheduled to take place on August 24.