National Economic University

Business School
Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Extra Exam assignment, autumn 2016

Instructor: Dr. Eythor Ivar Jonsson

Student: Nguyen Trung Hieu
Class: 5B
ID: CQ531345
What is important about the Lean Start-up revolution and how could it
be used in the Vietnamese context?

Nowadays, probably one of the hottest buzzwords in the entrepreneurship circles are
lean. Lean startup is born in order to reduce the chance of failure for entrepreneurship.
The lean startup is an approach to build companies and launch products quicker and
more in line with customer needs, as well as eliminating the need of long development times
and large amount of funding to launch a company, when compared with the traditional method.
With traditional approach, many company used to spend months or even years building and
perfecting a robust product or service, only to learn that customers do not want specific features
or the product altogether. This is the problem the lean startup solves. The lean start up involves
the company building a minimum viable product (MVP) or a version of the product that has
just enough features to be released, building only minimum set of features is important to get
the product in front of customers to get feedbacks. It may have some bugs, but the MVP is
typically shown to early adopters who are more likely to look past these bugs. The company
uses the MVP to get feedbacks in order to learn exactly what customers want. They take those
learning and decide whether to continue to build a product, whether to tweak the product or to
pivot, which is a change in direction to test the hypothesis about the product strategy or engine
of growth. The company continues this cycle, which is called the build-measure-learn feedback
loop. The lean startup approach shortens product development cycles and builds products that
meet customer needs through validated learning scientific experimentation and iterative
product releases.
In Vietnam, the lean startup is still a relatively new concept. However, in the context
of a fledging ecosystem for entrepreneurship, lack of investment and many obstacles make
startups difficult, this approach seems to be very suitable. Let take the story of Triip.me a
travel platform startup as an example. The founders of this startup started with only $500,
leveraging friends and family to keep it cheap. And by 2014, they had spent around $5,000 all
together over the last 16 months and their community of local travellers kept growing. Needless
to say they broke even a while back. Most other competitors had raised from $500,000 in seed
funding (Withlocals.com) up to $2.1 million in VC funding (Vayable). Meanwhile, this
Triip.me elbows with those big guys with just $5,000. After all, Triip.me is all about travelling,
 so they simply use their very own platform whenever they travel, and discuss with their
community wherever they go. Their travel therefore allow them to improve Triip.me every
time. So, it could be seen from the story of Triip.me that the lean startup could be a successful
formula for Vietnamese startup.

Why is the resources-based view important for entrepreneurship?

The existence, development or dominance of a firm in the business environment is

determined by its competitiveness, which means that a company can manufacture products or
provide services with better quality and lower cost compared with its competitors. And to
create and maintain such competitiveness, the management of resources within the firm plays
a very important role. This led us to a resources-based view of the firm (RBV).
According to Barney, sustained competitive advantage largely depends on the
resources (assets, capabilities, organizational processes, firm attributes, information, and
knowledge) a firm possesses. Although a firm's external environment is important, firm
resources are far more important than the environment in which the company operates. RBV
is based on two key assumptions, namely, resources are heterogeneously distributed across all
the firms, and the firm resources are largely immobile. Given these assumptions, a firm secures
competitive advantage if the resources possess the qualities of rarity, value, imperfect
limitability, non-substitutability, and non-transferability. The proponents of RBV argue that
competing firms will not be able to imitate strategies based on resources because there is causal
ambiguity and social complexity associated with the relationship between these resource
configurations and sustained competitive advantage. RBV has gained wide currency in the
academic lexicon because its capability logic is very convincing in explaining why some firms
achieve success despite the fact that they fall under the industry that is not performing well.
The core logic behind the RBV is the "capability logic" that states that a firm can outperform
rivals only if it has a superior ability to acquire, develop, configure, and use the resources to
sustain its competitive advantage. The basic argument of the RBV is that a firm's
competitiveness is a positive function of the resource mobilization and capability building so
that strategies are designed to capitalize on the opportunities and mitigate threats stemming
from the environment. The way in which firms exploit and leverage internal abilities and
resources is the key. Having superior resources is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
 What is important is that the resources and competencies need to be protected from exploitation
by competitors through imitation and substitution.
With resources-based view theory, a firm is able to evaluate the potential resources
which provide more benefit to the firm and enable success in the emerging markets. Besides,
the theory initiates the firm to examine whether the resources of the firm are valuable to the
expected level. Along with this, the availability of the resources is also checked within the firm
through this theory. The competitive advantages attached to the resources are evaluated so that
the firm can understand which resources is unique in nature and is not available to the
competitors of the firm. The resources that are non-substitutable in nature can provide more
benefit to the firm as the competitors wont be able to match the same expectation that the firm
adopt in the market. Also, the resources based operation within the organization enables the
organization to innovate products as per the demand of the customers and also enables
sustainable growth within the organization.
In conclusion, it has been established that the resources and competitive environment
within the organization is beneficial for acceleration of performance and achievement of
competitive advantage within the firm and at the same time also helps in management of
resources effectively. This paper sketches the connections between resources and competition
when it discussed how resources are used to compete in the market and may even be used as a
leverage to hurt competitors. In present scenario, for strategic managers, resource management
should be a part of competitive advantage where they would analyse the importance of internal
and external resources in order to bring opportunities and innovations within the firm.
Therefore, one can conclude that, resources-based view is a dynamic concept which enables
the firm to act, enact and operate as per its internal and external resources in order to gain
competitive advantage.

Describe the ecosystems for entrepreneurship in Vietnam and discuss

how it could be improved.
Ten years ago, such concepts as Start-up, venture capitals, or angel investors
were still quite strange in Vietnam. Nowadays, it is not difficult to come across information
about those issues on public media.
 According to Dr. Pham Hong Quat, Head of General Department of National Agency
for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization Development (NATEC), Vietnam
currently has about 1,800 startups, 20 venture capitals investing in entrepreneurial creativity
and innovation, 21 incubators and 7 acceleration organizations. Seminars or talk-shows sharing
successful start-up stories, or discussing business models, marketing strategies, pitching
investments for start-up firm are regularly held and frequently advertised. Also, many events
such as TechFest Vietnam, Hatch! Fair, and so on are really contributing to bring information
and knowledge on entrepreneurship activities closer to the community. Besides such events,
start-up coaching programs and activities are popping up more and more. That being said
startups is currently a pervasive trend in Vietnam.
Despite such development, the truth is that the startup trend in Vietnam is still behind
in comparison with other markets in the region. This is the inevitable consequence of a nascent
ecosystem, which needs a lot of improvements. The ecosystem for entrepreneurship in
Vietnam are currently having many big problems.
First of all, there are not enough startups registered in the ecosystem tapping into
professional resources like incubation. Too many entrepreneurs try to work alone, and for that
reason, they are quite possibly also making 100 percent avoidable or preventable mistakes.
Secondly, there is a funding gap between bootstrapping and institutional investors. This
gap is filled in mature startup ecosystems by strong angel investment networks. Currently in
Vietnam, angel investment is a new topic, and would-be angel investors are out there, but need
to be reached, made aware, educated, and given opportunities to try investment in early-stage
innovation-based enterprises.
Finally, its now the norm for Vietnamese startups to set up their companies in other
country, for example, Singapore. This would be a major concern for the future of Vietnam
startups ecosystem.
The solutions for those aforementioned issues could be, first, the government should
consider providing legal support for startups across the country. New policies should
guarantees less paper work required or preferable tax or transparency for startups to operate
efficiently. Also, startups should receive financial support from the government for training,
producing testing and marketing. There should be an on-line portal where startups could
register and keep updated about technologies, policies and funding. And, the government could
set up co-working spaces where startup firms can gain access to operational infrastructure at
low costs.