Role of Business Plan Competitions in Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Southeast Asian Region

It is irrefutable that both entrepreneurship and innovation serve as catalysts and have omnipotent roles in contributing economic and social value to the global economy. Although both contributory agents share the similarity of creating new ideas, there is an apparent difference between entrepreneurship and innovation. Delia Smith of Greenfield Ventures encapsulates the difference as follows: “If innovation is the creation of new capacities for wealth creation, entrepreneurship is the exploitation of these capacities” (Thomas 2014). In terms of economic value, the results of the research done by van Praag and Versloot (2008) testify that entrepreneurs not only engender relatively much employment creation and productivity growth but also produce and commercialize high-quality innovations. Moreover, entrepreneurial firms generate significant spillovers that endorse regional employment growth rates of all companies in the region in the long run. Korsgaard and Anderson (2011) exhibit how social value is created in multiple forms from individual self-realization over community development to broad societal impact. As regards innovation, President Gerard “Gus” H. Gaynor of IEEE Technology Management Council (2009) asserts that academia, government, and industry struggle to various degrees to translate ideas into innovations that provide for economic growth and offer some social benefits.