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UW-Madison Professor Explores Vietnam’s Entrepreneurial Climate
Vietnam FDIB participants Ingo Holzinger, left, and Phil Kim, right, pictured with Susan Huber Miller, managing director of the UW-Madison CIBER.
For Assistant Professor Phil Kim of the Wisconsin School of Business, the Vietnam faculty development in international business (FDIB) program (see article in CIBER News) provided not only an introduction to the business environment of that country but an opportunity to enhance his ongoing research as well. Kim made contact with networks of entrepreneurs in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City who introduced him to the entrepreneurial climate in Vietnam. Kim’s research seeks to understand why and how people become entrepreneurs, and to learn how findings from the United States and other advanced industrial countries translate to other markets. Fortunately for Kim, “Entrepreneurs are open about talking about their experiences —both their highs and lows.” His 10-day visit to Vietnam provoked new lines of questioning and challenged some of his previous thoughts about entrepreneurship.
Kim used his free time to supplement the daily FDIB lectures and site visits. “I was able to take insights from the official program and reflect on them with unofficial ones,” he said. Kim encourages other junior faculty to participate in an FDIB program if their other university commitments and responsibilities allow. “The benefits are impressive if they are international-minded,” he said. Several FDIB opportunities are available each year that focus on different countries and topics that may tie into faculty members’ research interests.
The level of entrepreneurship Kim found in Vietnam surprised him to a degree, given his previous research on societal-level attributes that stimulate new business creation. Among advanced, industrialized countries, the U.S. and Australia typically turn out the highest level of entrepreneurial activity given the autonomous nature of their economic systems. Kim discovered, however, with the help of a CIBER grant, that nations that offer strong social safety nets, such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries, link employers, employees, and government in a way that allows them to depend on each other and produces a relatively high number of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial businesses. He thus did not expect to find as much entrepreneurial activity in a country like Vietnam where the formal education system and workplace training mechanisms are not at the same level as in advanced industrial nations. “How can and are companies starting, in the technology field especially?” Kim wonders. Currently, with support from CIBER, he is drawing on recent scholarship in law and society, political science, and political economy that challenges traditional thinking about the need for formal legal processes to precede new business creation in order to explore how informal mechanisms such as personal relationships can spur entrepreneurship in the absence of a legal structure for it. Through his research, Kim hopes to help Wisconsin companies better target their exports of high-tech products to emerging economies, and to assist U.S. business leaders and policy-makers in evaluating promising opportunities.
Kim’s experience in Vietnam also will help him shape discussions in his introductory and advanced courses on entrepreneurship. The introductory class, for example, explores the types of life experience on which entrepreneurs can draw to build successful businesses. Kim said that learning about the varying ways in which individuals in different countries gain such experiences could help students better understand the entrepreneurial environment.