Incubation center established to promote youth entrepreneurship

Lionel Leong attends the plaque unveiling ceremony for the Business Incubation Center

Lionel Leong attends the plaque unveiling ceremony for the Business Incubation Center

Aiming to encourage local youths to look beyond conventional career options, the government inaugrated a Youth Entrepreneurship Incubation Center at the Macao Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM)’s Business Support Centre yesterday.
The new center, operated under Macao Economic Services, provides entrepreneurship assistance in such forms as training courses, consultations, free temporary offices, and business matching. Moreover, it collaborates with IPIM and other departments to offer “one-stop” administrative services helping entrepreneurs to set up new companies.
As he inaugurated the new center, the Secretary for Economy and Finance, Lionel Leong, stated that this is the government’s “new attempt” to provide youths with greater support through a collaborative effort by public and private sectors.
“Society has been calling for more support from the MSAR government to assist youths in entrepreneurship and finding employment, other than funding them with our financial aid schemes. Thus, this center is expected to provide both hardware and software, (…) showing the government’s support,” he said.
The secretary stressed that the new center could eventually offer more employment opportunities to local youths “if good results come from it.”
“After all, young people’s entrepreneurship can attract more of their peers to join the [entrepreneurship] sector and create more job opportunities,” he said.
Leong also indicated further expectations of what the new facility should achieve. Given that it is jointly founded by various departments, the center will test the government’s capacity for inter-departmental collaboration.
“This is also an experiment to see if collaboration between our departments can reach society’s expectations, and to reflect on where we can improve,” he said, adding that the center will also cooperate with civil associations, training organizations and professional societies.
Furthermore, Leong said that the incubation center is aimed at “delivering cross-
regional services” to Macau-
based entrepreneurs who wish to reach out or expand to other regions; ideally, project promotions and even offsite administrative procedures could be facilitated by the center through cooperation mechanisms with other regions.
“In addition, we want to fully listen to users’ opinions in this process, as to whether the structure of our departments, as well as the internal guidelines and related laws are meeting the public’s demand for new services from our public administration,” he added.

Categories Macau