CEBU, Philippines – The biggest danger faced by a business owner promoting any kind of new technology is to simply fall head over heels for his product – and to ignore the more crucial matter of how its intended market will make use of it, according to innovation specialists at the Ateneo Graduate School’s Master in Entrepreneurship program.
By avoiding the former and zeroing in on the latter, technology entrepreneur David R. Cruz III, co-founder of Neugent Technologies is on his way to dramatically changing the lives of the markets he serves while enjoying strong and sustained revenue streams. Among Neugent’s most salable products is the landline phone bundled with a detachable android tablet and a line of e-book tablets for educators.
The device and others in the Neugent lineup recently won for his company second-place in the Asian Entrepreneurship Award 2012 held in Japan. Neugent is the only Filipino end-to-end company in the digital manufacturing arena. Cruz explains: “We can create a device from concept all the way to execution.” The phone cum tablet now being marketed by a leading telecom player will provide unprecedented access to the internet to thousands of individuals. Cruz intends to use a similar tablet – conceived and made in the country and provided with content made specifically for Filipinos -- to revolutionize Philippine education.
It will cost a fraction of its better advertised American and Korean tablets, which have already been adopted by some schools. Let them cater to the top schools,” says the self-effacing Cruz. “We will focus on the thousands of other schools that need a more affordable device but at the same time will provide all the books, the web access and learning applications these students need.”
The Asian Entrepreneurship Award (AEA) held last May gathered 18 technology start-ups in the field of life-sciences, cleantech, and IT throughout Asia operating for at least five years and had not yet been listed in any stock exchange. They were judged according to innovation, social impact, scalability and a team’s ability to execute a project. Neugent was nominated to the AEA by Professor Tony del Carmen, program director of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business Master in Entrepreneurship program, a course that was developed in partnership with Ace Center for Entrepreneurship and Management Education.
According to del Carmen, Cruz was his natural choice. Cruz had graduated from the received his Master in Entrepreneurship (ME) certificate in 2010. As required by the ME program, Cruz enrolled Neugent as the ‘business laboratory’ that he would work on over the course’s 18-month duration. He was not expected to take a leave from that business over that period. But to simply attend classes at Ateneo’s Rockwell campus every other weekend and to use the time in between to apply his learnings to Neugent.
Cruz relates that during the first six months of the program, he realized through careful analysis of the Philippine business environment that his biggest potential markets would be in education and in entertainment-- and not in the security and surveillance devices he had been producing.
In the next six months, he worked on strengthening the weakest points in Neugent’s value chain. In the final six months, he came up with strategies contained in a five-year business plan that were carefully vetted by his professors, who were also entrepreneurs and had specialized fields of business expertise. The phone-tablet, tablet for schools, a box that provides intelligence to an ordinary LED TV and other smart devices lined up for launching this year were the results of his deliberate evolution as a technology entrepreneur.
Del Carmen relates that Neugent won the competition in Kashiwanoha campus in Kashiwa City, Japan’s emerging Silicon Valley, not because it offered a breakthrough technology. But because it had a winning business strategy anchored on changing the lives of Filipinos through digital devices they would otherwise not be able to afford except through Neugent. “The judges realized the kind of social impact Neugent had begun to unleash among Filipinos,” says del Carmen. “We at the Ateneo were especially proud that his devices would have a positive social impact, an end goal embraced by the school.”
With Neugent co-founder Korean tech expert Michael Chang, Cruz says his company has learned through the years never to conceptualize a device without an intended market for it. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about creating innovation and that means taking careful risks. In technology entrepreneurship, especially device development, those risks are magnified many times over.
Cruz notes: “Not all bets will end up successful, and failure is an unavoidable part of the process. The key to winning then is to build an agile team with the tenacity to outlast the failures, the openness to keep learning, and persistence to move forward in the face of overwhelming odds.”