From Meeting to Setting Standards: The Next Chapter for Vietnam's Businesses

Vietnam has demonstrated an impressive capacity to learn, adapt, produce, and integrate into global markets.

Competitive costs, a substantial workforce, entrepreneurial energy, and participation in international supply chains have helped transform its economy.

As Vietnam enters its next stage of development, enterprises have an opportunity to build on these strengths by developing deeper capabilities: improving productivity, creating distinctive solutions, and retaining more of the value they generate.

This journey can be understood through three connected stages: meeting standards, sustaining standards at scale, and setting standards that the market recognises as a reference.

Here, meeting standards means applying established requirements and management practices; setting standards means becoming a market benchmark through demonstrated performance and value. Formal national and international standards follow their own development and consensus processes.

Moving through these stages requires enterprises to think and act differently. Innovation management provides a disciplined approach to identifying opportunities, developing and testing solutions, and translating them into value. It connects ambition with the organisational capability needed to deliver results.

Vietnam's Next Stage: Improving the Quality of Growth

Vietnam's innovation performance provides grounds for confidence. In WIPO's Global Innovation Index 2026, Vietnam ranks 43rd among 139 economies, with innovation outputs ranked 35th and innovation inputs ranked 54th. WIPO also recognises Vietnam as having performed above expectations for its income level for 16 consecutive years.

These results reflect sustained progress. They also invite an important question: how can Vietnam strengthen the foundations supporting its future innovation performance?

The World Bank points to complementary priorities: raising productivity, retaining more value domestically, and deepening connections between foreign-invested firms and domestic enterprises.

For enterprise leaders, the practical test is whether international partnerships strengthen internal expertise, whether employees and local suppliers become more capable, and whether the organisation can turn its own solutions into value. The answers will determine how effectively participation in global markets translates into lasting domestic capability.

Meeting Standards: Establishing the Foundation

Meeting established standards helps enterprises build trust and participate in demanding markets and supply chains. Alongside requirements for reliable operations, enterprises need to develop their ability to innovate.

Building that ability requires investment and commitment. International partnerships can contribute expertise and new ways of working, but the leadership challenge is to embed that knowledge within the organisation and strengthen its own capacity to innovate.

Establishing this foundation gives the enterprise a structured approach to pursuing innovation. Its effectiveness depends on how leaders adapt established requirements to the organisation's purpose, context, and ambitions.

Sustaining Standards: Making Capability Repeatable

The second stage is the ability to sustain and improve performance across teams, projects, locations, and periods of growth.

An enterprise may deliver an outstanding project through the exceptional efforts of a few people. Sustained organisational capability develops when successful practices become embedded, shared, and improved throughout the business.

This requires alignment between leadership, strategy, people, processes, resources, and partnerships. Clear accountability and meaningful performance measures help leaders understand whether the organisation is achieving its intended outcomes.

Innovation management is central to this work. It supports an organisation's ability to recognise opportunities, explore alternatives, manage uncertainty, and move promising solutions towards implementation and adoption.

Innovation can create value through products and technologies, services, processes, business models, and better ways of organising work. Its relevance therefore extends across the enterprise.

Setting Standards: Earning Recognition Through Value

The third stage emerges when an enterprise develops an approach, solution, or level of performance that others begin to recognise, adopt, or use as a reference.

An enterprise might become a benchmark through a production method that improves reliability, a service model that raises customer expectations, or a solution that creates greater commercial and environmental value.

Recognition must be earned through evidence: sustained performance, customer acceptance, independent validation, and adoption by others.

This ambition is relevant to enterprises of all sizes. A specialist manufacturer or service provider can establish a reference point within a focused field by solving an important problem exceptionally well.

The central objective of innovation remains realising value. When an enterprise demonstrates a distinctive and effective way of doing this, it can influence market expectations and become a benchmark for others.

ISO 56001: One Framework Across All Three Stages

ISO 56001, the international standard for innovation management systems, sets out requirements for managing innovation systematically. It helps enterprises connect their innovation ambitions with the leadership, resources, and partnerships needed to realise value.

Its relevance extends across all three stages. The same requirements that help an enterprise meet standards also help it sustain them as it grows, and evaluate whether a new approach performs well enough for others to adopt.

In practice, a well-designed system helps leaders decide which opportunities to pursue, when to commit further resources, and how to judge the results. That discipline helps promising solutions move towards commercialisation and adoption.

Masterise Group: Examining the Capability Journey

Masterise Group provides a contemporary example through which to examine this progression. Its international partnerships and expansion create opportunities to consider how Vietnamese enterprises acquire expertise and translate it into lasting organisational capability.

In February 2026, Masterise and Marriott International announced a multi-property agreement covering hospitality and residential developments in Vietnam. Such partnerships create a setting in which international brand requirements must be translated into design, delivery, management, and service practices.

The group's involvement in aviation infrastructure through the Gia Binh International Airport project introduces further complexity, with stated ambitions connecting aviation, logistics, and economic development.

From an innovation management perspective, the important question is how these activities strengthen capability over time.

Is expertise transferred to local teams and suppliers? Are lessons shared across projects? Do governance and quality assurance develop alongside expansion? Can capabilities acquired in one field be adapted effectively to another?

These questions apply to any enterprise pursuing growth across increasingly complex activities. International partnerships create opportunities to build capability; sustained delivery and operational outcomes demonstrate how effectively that capability has developed.

Progress towards becoming a market reference must ultimately be assessed through performance and value created over time.

Connecting Enterprise Capability to National Competitiveness

Enterprise capability has greater economic impact when knowledge and improved practices are shared and adopted across the wider economy.

Businesses can strengthen local suppliers, develop talent, collaborate with universities, and help customers adopt better solutions. Through these relationships, the benefits of innovation extend beyond an individual enterprise.

Government, research institutions, industry associations, and investors can support this process by improving access to expertise, applied research, finance, testing opportunities, and markets.

For Vietnam, the opportunity is to make these connections more productive, so that international participation strengthens domestic capability and enables more enterprises to move into activities that create greater value.

Meeting standards builds trust and access. Sustaining standards builds reliable organisational capability. Becoming a market benchmark requires that capability to produce outcomes others value and choose to follow.

The next step begins with a question every enterprise leader can ask: how must we think and act differently to build the capabilities that will create greater value tomorrow?

About the author: Kent Matla is Chairperson of the Australian Innovation Management Institute (AIMI), with over 25 years of experience in innovation, business growth, investment and international markets. He also serves on the Western Australian Government Innovation Advisory Board and as an Ambassador of the Global Council for Innovation Organisations (GCIO). He is the author of Making Innovation REAL: A Practical Guide to Innovation Management.