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The road ahead 18 Oct. 2007 |
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Tomorrow we will be in
Cagayan de Oro City for another leg of the Go Negosyo national caravan
for entrepreneurship. Barely two weeks ago, we were in San Fernando, Pampanga for a Go Negosyo made even more significant by the presence of President Arroyo herself. A brainchild of Presidential Consultant for Entrepreneurship Jose Concepcion III and his co-founders of the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship, the Go Negosyo caravan features and gives due recognition to inspiring success stories in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), with the celebrity and outstanding entrepreneurs serving as resource panel in the Go Negosyo forums held with the caravan. In Pampanga, we had furniture makers, leading food and pastries manufacturers, real estate developers and school owners, including a pioneer in new and renewable power. Cagayan de Oro promises an almost identical basket of successful and inspiring entrepreneurs, that includes the owner and developer of Cagayan de Oro’s leading industrial and commercial park, a famous baker, an automotive manufacturer and distributor, to name just a few of them. We promise you the full list in our future column. As we had occasion to point out in the past, the road to take if we hope to prosper, is the one laid for us by our inspiring entrepreneurs. And in the time that oversight of MSME was given to my Office, I have seen and met quite a number of them, enough to know that there are many out there who want us to succeed by being good at what they do. Among my favorite success stories, one that I featured early this year, is Moondish Foods Corporation, a pioneer in the preparation, packaging and export of native delicacies, like Bicol’s laing. Stuck with a business that was seasonal (school canteen), and a market that was sensitive to price hikes (school kids), the Manrique couple, Jun and Ana, were in search of a more stable source of income. They found all the answers at the Department of Science and Technology (DoST). The DoST’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) introduced the Manriques to the different food technologies classified by FNRI as transferable and "commercializable," one of which was canned laing. Together with another DoST agency, the Industrial Technology Development Institute (ITDI), the couple pilot-tested and launched the new product, with the further help of still another DOST agency, the Technology Applications and Promotions Insitute (TAPI), that provided and financed the technology and facilities for packaging laing, making it exportable. Beyond DoST, the Manriques got help from the Philippine Export Import Credit Agency (Philexim) with a credit line to cover their export commitments. Moondish now boasts of an expanded product line, from laing, to puso ng saging, ampalaya sa gata, mismo tuyo and mismo bagoong, and of course, Bicol express. The country’s MSME is the principal engine for creating and generating jobs. The emerging breed of microentrepreneurs, after creating income opportunities for family members, create employment for neighbors, and many others in their community. The road they have taken, is obviously the road ahead. |
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