Macau (MNA) – Local start-up companies will be discussing and exploring Macau SAR business challenges and opportunities until November 26, as the Macau International Start-up Week (e) kicked off today.
The event congregates local start-ups showcasing their achievements together with a wide range of activities including pitches, mentor sessions, presentations by experts and networking meetings.
Manuel Vasconcelos Correia da Silva, co-founder and CEO of This Is My City creative festival and a ‘starter-up’ himself, said to MNA that this event correlates with the government’s idea to diversify the economy away from the gaming sector.
Mr. Correia da Silva helped to arrange some of the speakers in the sessions of the MIS-Week and he has been interested in the start-up environment in the city for a long time, highlighting that “the challenge is how do you build this ecosystem [the start-up business environment] from zero because we actually don’t have much.”
He said that Macau doesn’t have a culture of taking entrepreneurial risks and this also needs to be developed.
Mr. Correia da Silva also said that Macau should find its own advantages versus Hong Kong or Shenzhen, as they are on a different level in terms of business environment maturity.
He said that the links with the Portuguese-speaking countries are something that “Hong Kong doesn’t have so … the question is how we use that, how can we leverage on that.” He says that this is the main challenge for the universities, the entrepreneurs, the government and the financial sector. “We need to look at ourselves and see where can we leverage, and it can not be in everything.”
