EcoNusa Foundation jointly with partners scouts out solution innovation from challenges on food, health and education sectors with some young entrepreneurs from West Java in a virtual discussion entitled “Build Back Better: Exploring Business Innovation in Health, Food, and Education” on Monday May 10, 2021. The event is part of the Econovation 2021 series, a national business innovation competition that calls for entrepreneurs contribution to create sustainable economy and forest and ocean ecosystem conservation.
“Econovation is the response to pandemic situation we are currently facing in the context of education, health and food. We invite young innovators, entrepreneur and anyone with smart ideas to find the best solutions on how we are prepared for a better education, health and food by contributing their ideas to the innovation context here. We need sophisticated, new and out of the box innovations to build back better,” said EcoNusa Foundation CEO, Bustar Maitar, on the virtual opening of the roadshow.
The virtual roadshow also presented Egi Radityo, the founder of Taman Taruna Kebangsaan Institution and Vice Chairman of West Java Indonesian Young Entrepreneur Association (HIPMI), Sarita Sutedja, Foodizz’ GM Corporate Communication, and Andhika Raspati, Sports Medicine Specialist, as the resource persons.
Entrepreneurship is one of the drivers for Indonesian economy. To create sustainable economy, it needs innovative, adaptable entrepreneurship on the new normal which affect public extensively while keeping the surrounding ecosystem conservation. Econovation, initially held in 2021, encourages three sectors of entrepreneurship, food security, education solution and community-based health sector.
We realize that health sector is one of the sectors closely related to Covid-19 pandemic. Most people think that health sector is the one with the most profitable sector amidst the pandemic. “Many people think that health sector has growing profit. But in fact not all health services increases its profit. Many even collapsed. To date, there are many who lack knowledge and is misinformed with many who scare for vaccination or event neglect health protocol. From medical aspect, perhaps I do not have too much concern with profit. But with entrepreneur, it might help health sector in the context of testing distribution, vaccine distribution. It is expected there are many opportunities, instead of simply talking benefit and profit, but community benefit,” said Andhika.
Discussing about food sector, Covid-19 pandemic provides significant impact. As to Sarita Sutedja, there are positive and negative impacts in general to culinary industry. Negatively, there is turnover drop that forces culinary entrepreneur to rearrange strategy, look for and manage dataset to create customer bonding. Positively speaking, culinary entrepreneur in the form of Small and Medium Enterprise has faster speed of development than corporation.
“Talking about innovation, the point is that the idea does not fall down from the sky. All innovations have processes. Some simple steps to scout for ideas for innovation, as to me, is by knowing opportunity or identifying the existing problems surrounding us. Then make a small research to get data, fact, information. The next step is ideation to get some insight before making business plan and action,” Sarita said.
It is not only health and food sectors, but education which is also deemed a way to create a qualified generation of the nation also faces challenge. Let alone, restriction of physical contact has forced all kinds of teaching and learning to be done virtually. Egi Radityo said, “Pandemic by all means is challenging to me and my colleague on education sector, because we have to make many kinds of adaption to online education. Given the fact that the state entity is human, thus the quality of human resource should be bettered,” Egi said.
Ideas and innovations on the Econovation are targeted to get solution from the real challenge faced by the community, including farmers, fishermen and indigenous community. In addition to solution, the ideas and innovations could be scaled up nationally to build back better.Econovation 2021 provides opportunity to Indonesian young people who happen to have business innovation to develop their business by registering to www.econusa.id/econovation up to May 31, 2021. The shortlisted fifteen business innovations will have an opportunity to get mentoring and business matching to develop their business.
