iNT’s taskforces in supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem mainly include utilizing technology and promoting entrepreneurship among faculties, researchers, students, and staff at Mahidol University. iNT actively facilitates academic research into practical innovation that can contribute to the social impact and benefit of mankind. With 2 medical schools, 7 allied health schools, and 7 hospitals under one roof of the university, we are mainly focused on health care innovation. For example, the development of Dengue Vaccine and Antibody requires not only expertise but also extensive efforts to prevent this detrimentally tropical disease. The products are licensed to international companies. Our students from Mahidol Startup Club have recently won the first prize from the International Maker Festival from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan for the application to help children with attention deficit disorder.

These innovative achievements create impacts on human and society eventually brings about pride to researchers and our team as stated in Mahidol University’s philosophy, “True success is not in the learning, but in its application to the benefit of mankind.” Also, the revenue from licensed technologies is returned to researchers and the university to create even more valuable researches. iNT incubates researchers through business-related workshops to encourage researchers to produce research that can solve pain points or respond to needs in the market. Our workshops are in high demand and often fully booked, reflecting our customer-based policy. These, as a result, will ensure the worthwhile of research’s innovation and entrepreneurship.

Of course, not everything we do is right. To lead innovation and entrepreneurship in university in Thailand is a real challenge. The lessons learned are part of our quality management and we do have designated agenda to revise and monitor our performance as after-action review (AAR).

For example, iNT has provided a series of entrepreneurial workshops. In the beginning, very few people were interested to join and thus slowing down our university taskforce. With AAR, we need to revise how we publicise these events. We then hosted and partnered with students’ initiated Mahidol Startup Club to gain wide access to students. It turned out that the publicity and attractiveness of our events reach more targets. Lately, most of our workshops are fully registered in advance and more people are on waiting lists. We realised that students are great partners to promote entrepreneurship in university. This, in turn, creates a great impact of the young generation.

In 2019, iNT organised the first university’s Research and Innovation Special Exhibition, called Mahidol R-I-SE now. Unexpectedly, our faculties and students were deeply satisfied that they were able to share ideas and prototypes with society. Not only gained pride as innovators, they also had opportunities to engage with industry and related businesses. This is the great milestone to promote entrepreneurship in university. iNT has learned that, to think “outside-the-box”, it is more efficient to integrate knowledge along with potential customers and let it be fulfilled by “a natural process”.

With the global trend of the industrial revolution, we admit that the university is quite behind to run at the same pace. This is because its main mission is always focused on research and education. Entrepreneurship is not well understood among academic staff. Mahidol University’s Executives have realized that innovation and entrepreneurship are very influential to bring power of knowledge for the improvement of society and to meet with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This is why our institute, iNT, has been established as a key structure of Mahidol University. Started with a minimal engagement in entrepreneurship among faculties and students, iNT is now recognised as a signature of Mahidol’s entrepreneur-driven organisation.

iNT is more than ready to move on. With full support from the university, we put our heart in the 3-layer partner strategy. Firstly, “Internal Partnership” will emphasize on encouragement and trust among faculties and students of Mahidol University in which they will have a positive mindset on the significance of entrepreneurship. Secondly, “External Partnership” will strengthen the relationship between university and industries/investors to expand opportunities for our innovations and startups. Finally, “International Partnership” will create a network to promote entrepreneurship engagement in universities with worldwide recognition. iNT devotes itself to be the multi-level connector and our friends are invaluable. We realize that our slogan “Power of Mahidol Innovation” is not just for Mahidol University, but with all hands together it will be for the “Global Power of Entrepreneurship”.