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By Ike Suarez Tech Times, Correspondent
The Asian Institute of Management and the Ayala
Foundation Inc. have joined hands to launch a technology business incubator in Makati City to house and
nurture startups seeking to create a robust niche for the
Philippines in the global market for software.
The partnership to launch the AIM-Ayala TBI
formally introduced recently with the signing of a memorandum of
agreement between the graduate school of business and the corporate
social responsibility arm of the Ayala Corp. The ceremonies took
place at the Asian Institute of Management Continuing Executive
Education and Development Center (ACCEED) in Makati City.
Under the agreement, AIM shall house and
administer the TBI in its campus. Its faculty of academicians and
management experts shall be on call to give consultancy services to
locators should these be desired.
On the other hand, AFI shall assist AIM in
screening, recruiting and recommending locators. It shall also
provide backroom office and legal services for a modest fee to
technopreneurs seeking such assistance.
In a brief talk following the signing
ceremonies, AIM president Francis Estrada expressed confidence that
“there were more than enough technology savvy Filipinos with the
vision to establish startups that would offer innovative products
and services to global markets.”
In a brief exclusive interview with Tech Times,
Estrada said the AIM-Ayala TBI would be housed in the ACCEED
building and is expected to have 15 to 17 high-tech locators within
the first quarter of 2008. He added that there already were several
applicants and screening is currently ongoing.
Guillermo Luz, AFI executive vice- president,
told Tech Times that the AIM-Ayala TBI would use many of the
management methods pioneered in the country when the UP-Ayala TBI
launched in June 2000 in the Diliman campus of the University of the
Philippines.
Luz explained the function of a TBI is a to
always foster the growth of startups to make them competitive. Thus,
there would have to be a graduation date for locators.
Luz also revealed that AFI will establish more
incubators in partnership with academic institutions such as the
Cebu campus of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas.
Technology business incubators are patterned
after incubators abroad that now form part of the academe-high
technology complex emerging in the global and knowledge-based
economy this 21st century. Pioneering examples would be Route 128 in
Boston near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is located
near Stanford, CalTech, and the various campuses of the University
of California. These areas are sites of startups, which quickly
commercialize innovations developed in R & D laboratories in
these educational institutions.
In the 21st century economy, intellectual
capital is considered to be more important than the traditional
factors that make up for success in an Industrial Age economy, land,
labor, capital. “AFI is helping promote the emergence of the
knowledge economy and technopreneurship in the Philippines,”
according to Luz.
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