Pangilinan said the office, likely to be set up in San Francisco, expresses how "crucial and necessary" it has become for their members to immerse in the ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and to network with companies, from start-ups to giants in the tech industry, all on the cutting edge of the new economy.
"The Philippines is so far behind in innovation," he said.
Pangilinan has gathered First Pacific's top executives in a summit in Palo Alto this week, lining up presentations and meetings with a broad range of Silicon Valley experts and institutions, leading to what they hope to be a bold move to make each part and whole more innovative and competitive.
Edward Tortorici, executive director of the Hong Kong-listed First Pacific, took part in a panel that followed Pangilinan's address to the Stanford students, and said, "our theme in these workshops is: 'Disrupt or be disrupted. Be the wolf or be the sheep.'"
Pangilinan shared that, "just on our first day here, we were told: What if Yahoo looks at the telco business? What if Google goes into energy?"
First Pacific's portfolio across Asia is bannered by dominant Philippine IT-telcos PLDT, Smart, and Sun, but it is also heavily invested in infrastructure (Metro Pacific), energy (Meralco), water (Maynilad), food and agriculture (Indofood and Roxas Holdings), and mining (Philex). It also owns or manages eight hospitals and has upped its play in mass media, controlling TV5, its online news portal InterAksyon.com, satellite-cable provider Cignal, and, most recently, the country's top business newspaper, BusinessWorld.
In all, Pangilinan said First Pacific's total value of listed assets rounds out to $38.6 billion.
Though the conglomerate's executives run companies that mostly dominate their respective sectors in the Philippines and/or Asia, all were candid in acknowledging room for change in its processes and culture.
Smart's Orlando Vea said: "Sixty percent of our workers are Generation Y. Only 3 percent of our management is Generation Y. Change must start with us."
Vea took his turn to address the Stanford audience with a litany of needs for a more innovative and adaptive group. "We need hardware and software engineers. We need help in big data, analytics, business intelligence," he said. "And we also need people who know and understand Design Thinking."
Tortorici said the office in San Francisco will initially serve "as a listening post", a representative desk that can help network with Silicon Valley individuals and groups while also capturing and relaying innovations – whether products or processes – to the larger operations in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
Pangilinan said the office may be up as early as April. They have scouted space right at the building of the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco he said. The unit will likely be set up, and initially led, by Earl Valencia, president of the IdeaSpace Foundation also set up by the MVP group.
IdeaSpace was seeded and operates in the Philippines, with a base embedded with First Pacific and Metro Pacific headquarters in Makati. It runs "innovation labs" and competitions annually, functioning as the group's "incubator and accelerator" where potential startups can pitch, and promising ideas can be leveraged off the network and operations of all member companies.
But having such an operation in Manila is not enough, Pangilinan said they are quickly realizing. "We need to be tapped into Silicon Valley. From (venture capitalists) to incubators to the biggest players, this has a complete ecosystem that we do not have in the Philippines."
Pangilinan said he envisions a "mix" of workers and talent to be recruited from the Philippines, and Silicon Valley itself, and then a two-way exchange of ideas between San Francisco and Asia.
First Pacific will remain focused on Southeast Asia, its leaders said, but even in its region and home turf, it will need to directly imbibe whatever it can of the culture of the Valley.
source: interaksyon.com
