Senior Visiting Scholar
Tuan Pham
Founder and Managing Director, CRC-TOPIC Business Inbubator, Hanoi University of Technology
Dates of Residence: November 12-16
Events
tuan@crc.edu.vn
Phone: 858-822-4964
Fax: 858-534-3939
Office: 1316
Education
M.S.C., Budapest University of Technology and Economics (information technology)
M.B.A., New York University
Biography
Tuan M. Pham is vice dean of Hanoi Advanced School of Science and Technology, and founding managing director of the CRC-TOPIC Business Incubator at Hanoi University of Technology. Pioneering business incubation in Vietnam since 2004, CRC-TOPIC has been selected by World Bank into 4/62 highlighted incubators worldwide, and its TOPIC64 project chosen by Development Gateway Award into top 7/160 global finalists in 2006. The TOPIC64 project led by Mr. Pham is sponsored by QUALCOMM, along with Microsoft, the US Agency for International Development, Hewlett-Packard and EVN Telecom. The incubator has leveraged public-private-partnerships to help create over 70 ICT-related ventures in all 64 provinces, including software companies, web-service businesses and self-sustainable ICT training centers, etc. Its efforts have helped create hundreds of jobs, provided entrepreneurship training and networking opportunities to thousands of participants, and delivered ICT skills training to over 60,000 people. Pham has recently been elected a steering committee member of the InfoDev Incubation Asia Pacific Network (IDIANET), a networking organization of incubator managers in 38 countries. Capitalizing on these results, Pham is currently spearheading nationwide e-learning initiatives that aim to deliver quality higher-education programs to tens of thousand students by 2010, addressing the country’s need for an educated workforce, the mismatch between the legacy education system and industry requirements, and the shortage of resources in education.
Since his return to Vietnam in 2002, Pham has also co-founded two successful businesses that are now both among market-leaders in education and fashion industries. He is regularly invited to speak at local and international forums on business incubation, social entrepreneurship and workforce development. Previously, Pham was a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company in Budapest and Stockholm, where he advised top management of large corporations on various issues including strategy, Information technology, finance, and marketing. Prior to that, Pham held management positions in Extramedia Ventures (venture capital, Boston, New York and Singapore) and Integra (software development, Budapest).
Pham’s PhD research included a project on credit card markets that was part of an international research project by Akos Rona-Tas (associate professor of sociology at UCSD) sponsored primarily by the National Science Foundation. Pham was in charge of organizing the fieldwork in Vietnam and designed a segment of the study on outsourcing IT in the credit card business. He is currently collaborating with Rona-Tas on a book on credit card markets in emerging economies. Mr. Pham is fluent in Vietnamese, English, and Hungarian.
