Filipino digital entrepreneurs lead Southeast Asia in marketing, sales and customer interactions.
“A big motivation for entrepreneurs’ adoption of digital technology is to cope with the increasing complexity of business operations and better keep track of finances, customer relationships, inventory, and logistics,” says an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on entrepreneurship in the digital age.
“There is a great deal of variation in the digital practices of entrepreneurs, with digitalization integral to the business models of some entrepreneurs but not others,” it says, defining “digital entrepreneurial business” as independent firms owned-managed by entrepreneurs applying digital technology in their business model.
Creative industries, prominent in the Philippine economy, combine the creation, production and commercialization of intangible and cultural content, including visual arts and crafts and audio-visual and interactive media.
“Interestingly, the degree of digitalization in Philippine creative industries is fairly high, as many creative entrepreneurs have their own websites — and some have their own internet applications,” the report says.
Among Asean+6 countries, Singapore’s digital entrepreneurs demonstrated the most business model experimentation. They responded to a range of challenges posed by COVID-19 much more quickly than their peers in the other Asean-6 countries.
The Asean+6 are Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India — with a combined population of over three billion people, or about half the world.
Digital entrepreneurs in Indonesia and Malaysia exhibit a high degree of digitalization in internal activities and in products and services.
The ADB report was based on interviews with 685 entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia. It indicates that digital entrepreneurs outperform their non-digital peers.
Analysis revealed that adoption of digital technology by entrepreneurs is a potent enabler of business model experimentation, which is a potent driver of business performance.
The study presents a new conceptual model of how digitalization, business model experimentation and entrepreneurial performance are related.
Analysis revealed that the adoption of digital technology by entrepreneurs is expected to drive business model experimentation.
For example, digital technology can be flexibly reprogrammed to perform different functions at low cost. Modifying a firm’s web page, for example, makes it cheaper to experiment with alternative value offerings.
Digitalization also enables the outsourcing of business activities that previously were built in-house. As functional service providers have become more sophisticated, multinational enterprises have become more adept at standardizing business processes.
