The personal stories of 25 individuals who have made a difference for Vietnam
Nearly forty years ago, the government of Vietnam introduced a series of policies that dramatically opened up and improved the economy while simultaneously declaring to the world that Vietnam was open for business. The new economic reform policies were numerous including a local enterprise law that facilitated the launch of hundreds of thousands of local companies as well as more than 40,000 foreign investment projects with nearly half a trillion USD in registered capital. These new policies also facilitated the creation of 15 bilateral trade agreements that provided viable markets for Made-In-Vietnam products.
First introduced in 1986, the official name of these policies is Đổi Mới. It has transformed Vietnam from a very low-income nation with a GDP per capita of about $100 in 1990 to an upper-middle income nation with a GDP per capita of around $4,500 in 2025. Within this same time frame, the extreme poverty rate has decreased to less than two percent from more than 70 percent.
How did all this happen?
Sam Van from SRO Partners and Sam Korsmoe, the co-author of Vietnam – Asia’s Rising Star, have completed a book that introduces some of the key individuals who have made these trends possible. The title of the book is 40 Years of Innovators. It focuses on the ‘Who’ instead of the ‘What’ or the ‘How’ of Đổi Mới. These are the people who have made a difference for Vietnam from 1986 when Đổi Mới was introduced to the present day.
The project’s research methodology focused on five groups of people.
Group One: Vietnamese who studied and worked in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s and then returned to Vietnam to build their careers.
Group Two: Vietnamese who studied abroad (mostly in Western Europe, North America, and Australasia) in the 1990s and 2000s and then returned to Vietnam to build their careers.
Group Three: Self-taught and locally-educated Vietnamese entrepreneurs who built successful companies and organizations from the ground up.
Group Four: Overseas Vietnamese who have returned to re-build their homes and careers in Vietnam.
Group Five: Foreigners who have contributed and invested a significant portion of their business and professional lives to Vietnam in order to create something sustainable and valuable.
The authors segmented the 40-year time frame of the Đổi Mới era into five time segments.
Early Đổi Mới – This is from 1986 to the early 1990s when the reform policies were still being created and implemented.
The American Embargo Era – This is from before the Đổi Mới reforms in 1986 up to the lifting of the US Embargo in 1994 and then the negotiation for and the signing of the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2000.
Frontier Finance – This era is from the equitization trend in the late 1990s to the stock market in July 2000 followed by the launch of large venture capital companies in the 2000s and beyond.
Free Trade – This era begins with the US-Vietnam trade agreement, but truly takes shape when Vietnam entered the World Trade Organization on January 1, 2007.
Covid and Vietnam’s High-Tech Future – This time frame covers the impacts of Covid and the country’s embrace of high-tech manufacturing including the development of A.I. in Vietnam.
From the more than 50 people who were short-listed, Sam Van and Sam Korsmoe successfully invited 25 individuals into this project. These individuals have developed innovative ideas that have made a difference in Vietnam, a country that is on the verge of becoming an emerging market economy from a frontier market economy. It has the fifth largest GDP in Southeast Asia and is forecast by the accounting firm PwC to become the 20th largest economy in the world by 2050. How these individuals developed their innovative ideas and when these ideas were implemented is the focus of the book.