President Jokowi's Message to Local Startup Players

President Joko Widodo gave a short message for local startups to continue to innovate aggressively in the digital world, considering that the internet has unlimited opportunities. He conveyed this message when he opened the third day of the IDByte 2017 conference, Thursday (28/9).

Thanks to the internet, now every country is competing to develop the latest innovations and become a high-value global company. The President gave an example, of the 12 largest companies in the world, eight of them are technology companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Alphabet, and so on.

"We live in an era of openness, the internet makes us know no boundaries. With technology, telecommunications, and connectivity, people can easily carry out their daily activities. This means, an internet company can become the largest internet company in the world in a short time. the same] applies to local startups," explained the President.

Even Indonesian startups, according to him, have great opportunities and opportunities to advance to the global realm. It's just that not all parties, from the government, to the private sector, to actors, must be flexible in accepting technological changes.

The President also advised local startup players not to create rival startups against Google or Alibaba. Because this is considered a waste of energy. For this reason, he suggested that existing companies be used to build domestic innovations.

"In my opinion, according to you and your parents, they can be different, don't try to create a rival Alibaba or Google. Why do you do it again, I think it's a waste of energy. It's better to use them to develop new innovations because they can become a separate market."

Drive innovation with local elements

Jokowi added that these giant companies will not mean anything when expanding to new countries because they will run into problems with limited practitioners to understand local traditions.

Moreover, in Indonesia, there are many regional vocabularies that they do not understand. The concept of localization in this case is the main advantage that is controlled by local startups. Outside Indonesia, one of the local startups that has managed to dominate its own country is Flipkart, a service E-commerce comes from India.

The presence of Flipkart, continued Jokowi, made Amazon decide to acquire the online payment provider startup Emvantage. Also, a retail company from India Shopper Stop to compete with Flipkart.

"The internet does make distance meaningless. But that doesn't mean location isn't important. Foreigners don't necessarily understand the word excited or country. This limitation is a local opportunity to continue to grow."

One of the local startups that prioritizes local elements, called Jokowi, is HijUp, a service E-commerce especially Muslim clothing. The startup is considered capable of serving all consumers around the world by selling Indonesian products.

"So are we going to give up on the global internet giant? Absolutely not, we can't give up. We need to introduce Indonesian local products to the international market with global platforms such as Lazada and Tokopedia. Because our strength lies locally."

Drive acceleration with rule deregulation

In addition to emphasizing the message to startups to continue to innovate, the President said the government's role is to deregulate rules that are stifling and shutting down innovation. The old rules were judged not to be in accordance with the company's own principles, which were too rigid and inflexible.

Moreover, startups have a high risk of failure. So startups will not be able to grow aggressively if they are surrounded by rules that will actually kill them.

"Startups can be suffocated because of old rules, so deregulation is important. Many startups fail, one of them is because of regulatory problems. The important thing is that startups can rise again after falling," concluded Jokowi.