Below is an excerpt from a thought-provoking conversation between Taiwan National University Vice President of Academic Affairs, Liang-Gee Chen (abbreviated to “Chen” below), and CTIMES Chief Editor, Owen Ou (abbreviated to “Ou” below).

Ou: Being a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and also having served as an Associative Dean at Taiwan National University’s College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, do you think that studying electrical engineering and computer science is a good course of study for getting into startups? Are there opportunities to combine technology with creative cultural products, and does this create higher value?

Chen: In the global supply chain for the electronic information industry, Taiwan has always played the role of making resources for development more abundant, and this gives students in departments related to electronic engineering opportunities for creative development. However, for most types of technological evolution or improvements in manufacturing processes, the biggest obstacles to be overcome are in brand-new hardware startups. In comparison, these obstacles are lower in software startups, but you must look for a very unique starting point to enter the market.

In terms of creative cultural products, to be honest, I currently still haven’t seen too many actual successful cases. In the future, the road for creative cultural products will be more arduous. However, hardware, software, and creative cultural products will all have to unearth a kind of demand that the users will have a genuine need for, and that is of utmost importance.

Figure I

In the past, Taiwan followed the OEM model, and there was no way to come face to face with and understand the clients’ genuine needs. In order to be able to change the fate of perpetually following this OEM path, I believe that we must start from the level of education; therefore, during my time at Taiwan National University I started the Creativity and Entrepreneurship Program. Starting with fine arts education, students are challenged to deeply reflect on the relationship between products and customers’ experiences and hopefully to move away from Taiwan’s consistent adherence to the OEM model.

Ou: Could you share the specific ways that creativity and entrepreneurship is promoted at National Taiwan University?

Chen: After being employed at the National Applied Research Laboratory and returning to Taiwan National University to be Vice-President, I formally established NTU Garage as an entrepreneurial platform program to recruit students who aspire to be entrepreneurs or who would like to understand entrepreneurship and give them instruction and genuine hands-on experience. It is also designed to allow for further interactions and experiences exchanging information between students and entrepreneurs with experience in Silicon Valley.

Aside from completing the establishment of the Creativity and Entrepreneurship Program, training strategies are also necessary for planning and examining how to cultivate talent. Universities take students from all over the country and bring them to the campus in order to open up students’ fields of vision, teach students better professional knowledge and abilities, and also to allow students to devote and offer all that they have learned to society after graduation. I hope students will not invest four years of time to acquire a university diploma just for the sake of finding a job.

In the university system, as long as a student has entrepreneurial intentions and ideas, schools should cultivate the student’s knowledge and abilities that are related to entrepreneurship. They should also assist students in gaining entrepreneurial experience, and during their educational training, they should endow students, who have entrepreneurial aspirations, with training experiences that enable them to genuinely act and implement tasks.

Ou: There are numerous academic departments at NTU. How should students understand and make use of the NTU Garage creativity and entrepreneurship program?

Chen: I believe every footstep leaves its imprint. Progressively through NTU’s creativity and entrepreneurship program, professors who have transferred their skills into experience play the role of kindling, and then students’ entrepreneurial aspirations are ignited and nurtured. Through regularly scheduled two-way meetings, they have opportunities to collectively discuss future technologies and entrepreneurial plans. In the United States, there are many universities that have established entrepreneurial planning in hopes of not just educating students, but at the same time, educating professors so as to mutually enhance one another’s learning.

I hope that during the process of being trained in entrepreneurship at NTU, the entrepreneurial spirit of American garages can be embraced, allowing students to learn the required entrepreneurial knowledge and to cultivate their entrepreneurial abilities. After a student graduates and leaves the campus gates, the student will be able to create a job opportunity and not just go into the workplace and snatch up a job.

Ou: Could you talk about what is the motivating force that supports your energetic drive to establish the creativity and entrepreneurship program?

Chen: I was born and bred in Taiwan. Regardless of whether I was attending school or going to work, I always stayed in Taiwan. Therefore, I have sentiments for Taiwan that are difficult to part with. In the early days, people had to rely on themselves for everything in all of their undertakings so that they would be able to pass their days existing in an agricultural era. During that time, Taiwan did not have any exceptional resources. In order to survive, everybody had to rely on one another and collectively work hard together.

It cannot be denied that many industries in Taiwan have the follower mentality (little brother strategy), and they often will only enter the market in the mode of OEM manufacturers after certain products have already succeeded in opening the market. As a result, it is not difficult to find that among the students trained to enter into industry jobs after graduation, the vast majority develop and manufacture products that are identical to the other ones on the market. In contrast, I believe in making the students’ entrepreneurial style closer to the style found in Silicon Valley. Because new-born calves are not afraid of tigers, they will have the courage to apply the results of forward looking research into starting new enterprises.

Therefore, the motivation and concept of establishing a creativity and entrepreneurship program originated mainly from seeing successful cases of entrepreneurship among the classmates and friends in my vicinity. I saw them leave Taiwan to go to Silicon Valley and do startups, and in just a short time they earned considerable wealth. This is in contrast to many people who immerse their whole lives grinding away at work in Taiwan. When people with inferior competitive strength encounter a decline in prosperity, they usually are only able to groan and sigh.

Each year NTU has 8,000 fresh graduates. I believe that among them maybe only ten to one hundred of these graduates will choose to be entrepreneurs. I also believe that among those students who choose to be entrepreneurs, according to the so-called 20/80 theory, maybe only a minority will succeed. However, these people will be able to create market opportunities for the majority of Taiwanese people. This small possibility makes the creativity and entrepreneurship program that I have established a worthwhile endeavor.

Ou: According to my understanding, in Singapore, promoting entrepreneurship has already become a national target policy. National Singapore University places the same degree of importance on the cultivation of entrepreneurship as it does on education and research. But to make an observation about creativity and entrepreneurship in Taiwan, it appears that there have been some difficulties putting the energy into practice. Why is this?

Chen: Essentially, entrepreneurship is a simple matter. Because it is unlike a skill that one studies, academic institutes have only been able to copy one another and produce generic results. The difficulty with entrepreneurship is that it is difficult to duplicate, and innovation is necessary to successfully attract market interest. Singapore’s weak point is that the scope of its market is far smaller than Taiwan’s, and as a result, local startups have difficulty taking shape.

I believe that capital is not the only problem because in the process of creating a startup, it is not necessarily a requirement to use large amounts of capital – only enough is needed to support the startup’s basic needs. Nowadays, Taiwan’s entire business environment is different from in the past. Currently what is most needed is a shift towards a creativity and entrepreneurship ideal. I hope to be able to take the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley, where grass-roots roads are found in abundance, and transplant it to Taiwan where it will gradually take root and flourish.