27th Feb 2012

Keep Walking Project selects Hub Culture for Ho Chi Minh City

Entrepreneurs, innovators and others from across Vietnam have chosen a Hub Culture Pavilion as the business project they want to bring to Ho Chi Minh City in 2012. The new initiative is designed to enable valuable business ideas to get started in Vietnam.

As part of the Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Project, Hub Culture will bring a Pavilion to the city from 4-14 May, 2012, and coordinate a suite of experts to help emerging businesses to create, develop and begin implementation on their new ideas with a series of workshops running from 4-9 May, 2012. A variety of topics will be covered from business plans and financing to marketing and personal communication skills. Livestreaming video technology to bring experts into the Hub will enable participants to engage online and in the real world, linking experts from Silicon Valley, New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney. A network of Ho Chi Minh based experts will also be involved, leading live workshops and discussions with project participants during the workshop days.

The Pavilion will function with a host of networked activities centered online at http://hub.vg/hcmc and via Hub Culture's Facebook application. In addition to building and managing project folders and providing a suite of online tools to help projects move forward, participants and visitors will gain experience around a range of business skills - from writing a business plan to personal communications training, finance and accounting to branding, even social media basics.

Special event speakers from the local community and evening networking events will round out the official schedule of activities, with social media production integrated throughout the project.

Interested entrepreneurs can apply to join the workshop development programme, with 20 semi-finalists narrowed to 10 participating companies over the course of the spring. Full details and project applications in Vietnamese are available here.

Guests turned out in force this week in Hanoi to announce the project, with Hub Culture's Duyen Hackett joining the project leads for the announcement. Duyen and a team from around the world will be developing the project space, content and applications from London, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and San Francisco.

Mr. Nguyen Cong Hai Marketing Director of Diageo Vietnam says that the Keep Walking project fits with the spirit of Johnnie Walker: Pioneer entrepreneurship is the foundation platform of Johnnie Walker. Therefore, it would be amazing if we could help organize such a basic activity to develop infant business ideas into living projects. Three generations of the Walkers have developed their business operations - which was originally a small department store in 1820 - into an owner of a world-leading Scotch whisky brand. It is a basis of our beliefs that everything can be implemented if we have an excellent idea .