Build a city that breeds unicorns
The Da Nang Innovation and Startup Festival - SURF 2025 with the theme "Policy Launchpad - Nurturing Unicorns" was a great success, showing that the city's innovation ecosystem has begun to transform from a movement into a policy platform, from a fragmented model to a synchronously linked structure between the state, businesses, institutes and the market. Da Nang has gradually created a testing space for bold ideas, nurturing technology businesses with the capacity to reach far and the aspiration to go beyond borders.
Open Institution
Less than a decade ago, Da Nang was still known mainly as a tourist city, not prominent on the national innovation map. However, strategic decisions, especially the National Assembly's issuance of Resolution No. 136/2024/QH15 on the organization of urban government and piloting a special mechanism for city development, have opened up new institutional space for Da Nang to transform strongly.
Not stopping at attracting projects, the city is proactively designing more substantial startup support models, closely linked to core technology and sustainable growth capacity.
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According to the StartupBlink Center’s 2025 report, Da Nang has jumped 130 places and entered the Top 1,000 global startup ecosystems for the first time. The city is also the only locality in Vietnam recognized by this organization as the “fastest growing ecosystem”, reflecting a clear shift not only in international assessment but also in internal policy and community strength.
Mr. Ho Quang Buu, Vice Chairman of the People's Committee of Da Nang City affirmed: "We do not consider startups as a movement, but as an essential driving force in the structure of local economic development. What the city is creating is an ecosystem in which the government plays the role of designing the environment, businesses play the central role, and institutes and supporting organizations are the driving force behind it."
Currently, Da Nang has formed a network of innovation spaces, a startup incubation ecosystem, closely linked with universities, investment funds such as FUNDGO, international organizations such as StartupBlink, Korea Startup Forum.
Pilot programs such as testing the 15-layer Digital Twin model, carbon credit trading floors, and AI-based digital asset management are all being implemented in cooperation between the government and businesses.
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According to Mr. Hoang Minh, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, Da Nang’s steps are showing that the city has enough conditions to become a “policy laboratory” for the country. The city has three important factors: flexible institutions, dynamic community and international connectivity capacity.
The Ministry will continue to accompany, from policy connection to supporting deep technology incubation programs, digital assets, carbon credit markets... in accordance with the spirit of Resolution 57-NQ/TW of the Politburo on the key role of science, technology and innovation in sustainable development.
The driving force from the unique institution has helped Da Nang boldly develop a plan to establish an International Financial Center and Free Trade Zone, focusing on the fields of digital technology, Fintech, legal services, auditing and especially venture capital for startups.
Instead of competing with land incentives, the city focuses on investing in institutional capacity and brainpower infrastructure.
New strategic pillars
Along with the wave of digital technology and blockchain, Da Nang city is implementing long-term steps in the field of biotechnology, which is expected to become a new strategic spearhead. The establishment of the Biotechnology Center under the Department of Science and Technology is the first step in the effort to build a comprehensive biotechnology value chain, from research, development to application, commercialization, especially associated with the strengths of local resources such as Ngoc Linh ginseng, rare medicinal herbs and local genetic resources.
According to Secretary of the Da Nang Party Committee Nguyen Van Quang, the city has taken concrete steps in building infrastructure to serve the research and application of biotechnology. With the goal of becoming a center for linking biotechnology value chains in the region, Da Nang is promoting its core role in combining the conservation of genetic resources, the development of precious medicinal herbs with investment in laboratory infrastructure and public-private partnership models.
According to the Memorandum of Cooperation between the People's Committee of Da Nang City and CT Group, the city commits to accompany in implementing pioneering technology initiatives, including digitalizing marginal spaces (Digital Twin), piloting the carbon credit market, researching and developing products from medicinal herbs, exploiting valuable genetic resources for biomedicine and cell technology.
These collaborations are not merely communicational, but have been and are being materialized through experimental models and on-site research.
Deputy Minister Hoang Minh highly appreciated this direction and said: “Biotechnology is one of the fields in which the Ministry of Science and Technology especially encourages localities to take the lead in testing. Da Nang has the potential, a clear direction and above all, high political determination to enter deeptech fields such as molecular biology, biomedicine and indigenous medicinal herbs. This is a long-term direction, but has great potential in the near future.”
In addition, Da Nang's startup ecosystem is showing maturity through the emergence of many core technology application models. The projects that entered the final round of the SURF 2025 Startup Competition all focused on highly feasible solutions with deep technology elements such as a semi-automatic lotus seed shelling machine (LotusEase), a smart connection platform using NFC & AI (VicoNext), an asset management platform using artificial intelligence (OrionX)...
This is a sign of a shift from idea-based entrepreneurship to technology-based and practical management-based entrepreneurship.
Source: https://baodanang.vn/hanh-trinh-nen-kinh-te-sang-tao-so-3298448.html
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