The 2nd Ecothon for The Sustainability in Mekong River Basin




 

ASEIC, ASEM Eco-Innovation Center held the second Ecothon on October 7th. Let’s take a close look on the program pursuing global sustainability and its host institution, shall we?


ASEIC and Ecothon

ASEIC is an international cooperation organization established in 2011 to promote the sustainable growth of SMEs of the 51 countries in membership in Asia and Europe and is jointly operated by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups in Korea. Among various cooperative projects, ASEIC designed the Ecothon, a business starter competition, to support less developed countries with institutional and economical resource to spread the awareness on ‘SCP: Sustainable Consumption and Production’. It was first held in Cambodia last year. 

This program is subjected to a prep entrepreneur or a start-up at the beginning stage. Ecothon collects innovative ideas in regard to SCP and provides supports to develop these ideas to make it more practical. It includes lectures on entrepreneurship and SCP, idea discussion, mentoring from experts, business model development, and mock pitching. The winning team is given an opportunity to participate in 2-weeks incubating program locally and abroad.

 

The Second Ecothon, How was it Different from the First?

The Ecothon this year was held for about 3 weeks, starting from October 7th. With two more countries, Laos and Myanmar participated, 30 teams in total presented their sustainable business models and the entire program was proceeded online due to Covid19.

Mr. Cheol Yoon, who has been leading the environmentally friendly food packaging industry with the paper coating solution for sustainability, was invited to the program as a mentor.

While Mr. Yoon admired each team’s creative ideas and their enthusiasm, he questioned and advised on the availability of mass production, expansion of the business, profit structures, and so on. Through the time, each team got detailed feedbacks on how to improve their sustainable-directed ideas and was able to examine their business more thoroughly.

As Ecothon online, there were a few unexpected occasions occurred. However, that couldn’t stop the participants’ eagerness at all.

On the last day of Ecothon, the teams from each country made a final presentation and the winners of 3 teams from Cambodia, 4 teams from Laos, and 3 teams from Myanmar were announced. The recipients will join the global start-ups festival ‘COMEUP 2020’ hosted by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, which is a great opportunity to broaden the insights for the relevant industries and markets and to improve their ideas. The festival is also planned to be held online to prevent the virus from spreading and to be a standard as a global start-up festival in the un-tact era.

Global Sustainability We Work Together

Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar are located in Indochina Peninsula and with their base on socialism, they have been striving for development in various areas including economy and culture through diplomatic relations. Their impacts on ASEAN region are yet insignificant, however, the average economic growth rates in these countries reach over 7% when the economically active population mainly consists of the young generation. This shows they have highly positive growth potentiality and is great news that they are willing to cooperate with others for the sustainable earth.

Sustainability is a common task that every country in the world should take responsibility and work for the solution together. It is important for the countries who have stepped ahead to help and lead the followers on the path. We hope that there occurs more international collaboration such as Ecothon to continue developing global environment-friendly business models.

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