In light of the increasing activities in Indonesia’s technology industry, I think Indonesian government has to start supporting it in a more serious manner. Indonesian government needs to be ready on tackling problems which might emerge later on. In this past few weeks, I learned so much from the technology industry leaders overseas. I learned about the government’s role in order to grow innovation, nurture the industry, and to protect the companies as well as the consumer.
I come up with some crucial things waiting to be executed in order to support and protect Indonesian technology industry which is still in its infancy, fragile and in desperate need for support. Dear Mr. Tifatul Sembiring, our beloved Minister of Communication and Information, you might want to read this.
Intellectual Property Law
The intellectual property law is the crucial foundation for triggering innovation in Indonesia. By far, most people are lazy to innovate because they do not know how they can get control of their innovation/ idea. Sure, we already have the regulation on that matter. However, as usual, it is ridiculously easy to compromise that specific law. On the other hand, regulation and execution are important to spark up the innovation in Indonesia, especially in technology realm.
Entrepreneurship / industry support
Indonesian people know how painful it is to build their own company in Indonesia. The official retribution is not much, but bribes are needed everywhere to cut the bureaucracy line. It is an Indonesian typical issue. It makes many people feel difficult to build business without billion rupiah to start with.
It’ll be nice if government can give stimulus such as the convenience of starting a company, tax reduction, and so forth. For example, government can give tax exemption for companies that has operated less than two years and established by citizen under 30 years old to trigger the entrepreneurship industry. It can be an important foundation for Indonesia’s economy.
In some countries, government (or education institutions) gives capital stimulus fund for citizens/ students by taking the share ownership of the company established. Government/ education institutions take the role as Venture Capital / incubator to support the citizens/ students.
Investment policy
With the increasing number of investment activity from foreign entity, government should start to regulating for these type of investment in Indonesia. The recent regulation is being an obstacle for multinational technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and many others to open their office (invest) in Indonesia. Whereas, if the multinational companies open their office in Indonesia, there are many advantages for the Indonesian such as traction from other companies and offer job opportunities.
If it is about the sensitivity on foreign domination in Indonesian market, government should be clear about their position in this matter, whatever their position is. Indonesian government can take the position as Singaporean government by relying on foreign company to invest or as Chinese government that protect their local market.
Infrastructure
The problems on infrastructure is not something that will be solved in 1-2 years, however it can be important foundation in long term. Internet backbone infrastructure is already sufficient in big cities but not yet in some other rural areas which actually have potential market.
Specific infrastructure like banking payment also crucial for business, moreover for internet and mobile service based companies. They banking payment system can screw up the business in significant ways. Unfortunately now, many startups still rely on advertising business because the unreliable banking payment.
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By the strong foundation, technology industry can be stronger and keep growing. It is not possible that Indonesian technology industry can emerge as one of the big force in the region. I hope that you all DailySocial readers can give suggestions to government on what should government do to support the growth of technology industry.
Thanks for bringing up this topic. One thing that government have to consider is IT infrastructure if we talk about information technology, Indonesian market is really huge for IT business but for most start-up IT business always relying their apps to hosted in US or other grown country. Another thing is training for government officer as we know that most of people that works in government is know nothing about technology they prefer to choose manual method that really takes time and also fragile.