04 November 2010

Indonesian Entrepreneurs Build on Washington Summit

Tri Mumpuni and other Indonesian entrepreneurs who visited Washington recently encourage youth to bring business ideas to life.

By Christopher Connell
Special Correspondent

Washington — As Indonesia gets ready to welcome President Obama November 9, the country already has become a test bed for his administration’s efforts to promote entrepreneurship.

Indonesia sent the second-largest delegation to the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington in April, a diverse group that included a young venture capitalist, a social activist who builds power plants in villages, and a tobacco baron. Several of those entrepreneurs now have formed the nucleus of the governing board for Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) Indonesia, which will launch in Jakarta in mid-November as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

That will be the first in a series of events during the next 12 months to encourage Indonesian university students and others to catch the fever that inspired such business and social entrepreneurs as Sandiaga S. Uno and Tri Mumpuni to strike out on their own. In spring 2011, prominent American entrepreneurs and investors will visit Indonesia to hear pitches from and offer advice to some of the country’s most promising start-ups.

Indonesia also will host a regional entrepreneurs’ conference in July 2011. The GEP Indonesia board will orchestrate the events for that meeting.

Shinta Widjaja Kamdani, managing director of Sintesa Group, a family business with interests in energy, property development, food distribution and other products, has played a pivotal role in forming the GEP Indonesia board.  She is recruiting a full-time “Entrepreneur in Residence” and a staff that will work on encouraging innovative businesses and start-ups.

“We are putting in all our resources together with various existing entrepreneur organization in Indonesia as partners,” said Kamdani, a graduate of Columbia University in New York. “Hopefully, with our government and other stakeholders’ support, we will put entrepreneurship on the map of Indonesia.”

In this April 2009 photo, President Obama greets Indonesian entrepreneur Sandiaga Uno after the two men spoke of basketball and business.

The summit in Washington was an outgrowth of Obama’s efforts to redefine U.S. relationships with countries that have large Muslim populations. The Global Enterprise Program encourages entrepreneurship in emerging-market countries to spur job creation and economic development. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in April that GEP would be rolled out first in Egypt and Indonesia, with a dozen countries to follow. Its principal activities include entrepreneurship training, business-plan competitions, and matching budding entrepreneurs with mentors and investors.

As part of GEP, the State Department sent U.S. investors and entrepreneurs to Jordan and Lebanon in June; another such delegation heads to Egypt in January 2011.

Indonesia, a republic with 242 million people, was a country friendly to the United States even before Americans elected a president who speaks Bahasa Indonesian. Obama surprised Indonesian delegates in a receiving line at the entrepreneurship summit by addressing them in their language.

Uno, a summa cum laude graduate of Wichita State University in Kansas with a master’s degree in business administration from George Washington University in Washington, chatted with Obama about their mutual love of basketball — Uno managed the Indonesian women’s team that competed at the Southeast Asian Games in Manila in 2005 — but, more important, about what business innovators can do for their countries. Uno is a founding partner of Saratoga Capital, a private equity company with investments in coal, oil, gas and telecommunications in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

“He [Obama] said that entrepreneurship is the main actor that drives the Indonesian economy, instead of the government,” said Uno. Obama said Indonesia has the potential to become one of the world’s biggest economic entities, in part because of its success in adopting democracy and decentralization, according to Uno.

Ananda Siregar, another U.S.-educated (Northwestern University) entrepreneur, raised $17 million in venture capital to start his movie theater chain and distribution company, Graha Layar Prima (Blitzmegaplex). He said that, since the Washington summit, he has been asked “numerous times to share thoughts on how to translate the intention into actionable plan. In short, many government branches are more open-minded to ideas on how to create more entrepreneurs.”

Antonius Tanan, another summit delegate, is president of the Universitas Ciputra Entrepreneurship Centre. Tanan said that with more than 15 Indonesian ministries already having programs that help small businesses, this is “a perfect time to bloom entrepreneurship in Indonesia.”

Goris Mustaqim, 27, was the youngest of the 10-person Indonesian delegation. After earning an engineering degree, he founded a company called PT Resultant Nusantara that markets radio frequency identification technology and smart cards to schools and other customers. He also opened a foundation called Asgar Muda that works with youth in his hometown of Garut.

Mustaqim regards the GEP “as a new beginning of cooperation between the U.S. and Indonesia, not only government to government, but person to person.” The information being shared about entrepreneurship “can help more people get prosperity. I think that is not an American dream or an Indonesian dream, but a world dream.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)