The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced a plan to establish four business start-up service centers across the country, hoping to create 800 innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by 2011 and encouraging more people to start their own businesses amid the economic downturn.
The ministry announced the plan yesterday at Taipei’s Nangang Software Park, where the ministry’s “talent incubation centers” set up booths to attract investments and provide start-up consultation.
SMEs played an important role in the nation’s economic development and helped stabilize domestic employment, the ministry’s Small and Medium Enterprise Administration (SMEA) said in a press release yesterday.
However, the recent economic downturn has resulted in a decline of new SMEs, it said.
The SMEA said only between 30 percent and 40 percent of those who start their own businesses in Taiwan eventually become successful, underscoring the difficulty of starting a business.
To create a healthy start-up environment and build the nation into an entrepreneur-friendly economy, the SMEA said it would invest more than NT$100 million (US$2.96 million) by 2011 to help local SMEs transform and upgrade their operations.
The administration said local SMEs, which are particularly vulnerable to the global financial crisis, were in urgent need of transformation and upgrade, and the key to successful transformation was creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.
“There are five new industries we want to nurture — wireless broadband, digital content, green energy, cultural and creative, and health care,” SMEA director-general Lai Sun-quae (賴杉桂) was quoted as saying by the Broadcasting Corporation of China.
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