The Viet Solutions 2020 competition, a hunt for Vietnam’s top technological solutions hosted by the Vietnam Ministry of Information and Communications, kicked off on Wednesday in Hanoi.

The event, organized in partnership with military-run telecoms group Viettel, aims to find top-tier digital solutions for individuals, enterprises, and businesses all over the world.

The competition is open to any and all entrants, regardless of nationality, capable of innovative products or applications that can be applied to an array of sectors, such as game content, music, video, news, multimedia, and utilities.

Contestants are also able to submit solutions to existing problems in ealthcare, education, finance and banking, agriculture, transportation and logistics, energy, environmental resources, and industrial manufacturing.

Organizers said the competition is intended to facilitate connections between national regulators, large-scale enterprises, and creators with ideas to solve complex social problems.

Viet Solutions 2020 is currently the largest innovation competition in Vietnam, awarding cash prizes as well as non-cash prizes in the form of opportunities for cooperation following the contest.

"Vietnam has a considerable advantage in digital transformation thanks to a large number of telecom companies and a powerful information technology sector," said Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung at the launch event.

"It's time for us to take the chance to make our nation take off and to elevate the nation's rank in the field.

"The solutions facilitating digital transformation will focus on developing platforms, especially Vietnamese platforms.

"One digital transition platform would address a common problem for millions of people and thousands of companies."

The minister also stressed that data is now considered valuable material, so "it must be stored in Vietnam and by Vietnamese platforms."

Accordingly, Hung's expectation is that Viet Solutions 2020 will not only help to find innovative solutions to Vietnamese problems but serve as an answer to similar global questions.

Cash prizes of VND200 million (US$8,670), VND100 million ($4,330), and VND50 million ($2,170) will be awarded respectively to the first-place, second-place, and third-place finishers.

Apart from the cash prizes, the winning teams would have opportunities to sign contracts with Viettel to commercialize their products and get up to 75 percent of the generated revenue.

Viettel said it is committed to fully sponsoring the three winning teams to take part in C1 Start-up Cup competition in the U.S. – a contest with awards worth a total of $50,000, or to partake in the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2020 in Barcelona, Spain.

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