2025-12-09
The Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) convenes "From Project to Product: Taiwan's Path to Global Competitiveness in Software" forum on November 22 during the 2025 Meet Taipei Startup Festival. Minister Yi-Jing Lin (林宜敬) led an in-depth discussion with the Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen (陳怡樺), Perfect Corp. CEO Alice Chang (張華禎), and CyberLink CEO J.H. Huang (黃肇雄) on Taiwan's opportunities for transformation of its software industry under the wave of AI and Cloud technologies.
The three CEOs, from their practical experience, shared how to build a new paradigm for brand value and international competitiveness through effective product management. Over 220 attendees from various software-related sectors, including information services, telecommunications, internet services, integrated marketing, financial consulting, and startup teams, actively participated in the forum. They further exchanged opinions after the session, collectively sparking new ideas for the development of Taiwan's software industry.
In his opening remarks, Minister Lin pointed out that Taiwan's software industry can be divided into two categories: "Project-based" and "Product-based." For a long time, the majority of domestic software enterprises have previously focused on project-based development, crafting customized solutions for specific clients, a model that enables rapid response but limits scalability and the accumulation of R&D capacity.
A product-driven approach, by contrast, transforms software into modularized and globally scalable products, enabling greater value creation through replication and economies of scale. Once development is completed, the product can be sold to an unspecified large number of customers. Minister Lin emphasized that by "Doing Products" can greater value be created, and called on more enterprises to engage in product-oriented development."
During the panel, Minister Lin and the three CEOs discussed pathways to strengthening Taiwan's global software competitiveness, focusing on core challenges such as a limited domestic market, a constrained talent pool, and insufficient international experience. They emphasized that software companies have to adopt a global mindset from day one. The CEOs also pointed to the shortage of marketing talent, noting that effective software marketing relies heavily on hands-on experience and the ability to speak the customer's professional language. The discussion further explored how generative AI is reshaping the industry, highlighting opportunities in specialized small language models (SLMs) and sovereign AI, which chart a promising direction for Taiwan's software sector.
Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen stressed the importance of understanding customer pain points and adopting customer language. She noted that GenAI significantly narrows language barriers, creating new opportunities for global marketing. Trend Micro is currently adopting a new marketing approach internally called Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, embedding engineers directly in front-line customer engagement and turning them into talents with marketing and consulting mindsets, to accelerate product iteration and gather real-time feedback. Therefore, future engineers need to learn how to "ask questions," specifically asking to uncover and resolve the customer's true pain points.
Chen also highlighted Taiwan’s opportunities in unique domain knowledge in terms of the foundational technology required in the Gen AI era. For example, Trend Micro possesses unique data and analytical capabilities in the field of cybersecurity. Taiwan’s software enterprises could take developing Small Language Models (SLMs) into consideration to become leaders in their specialized fields.
Perfect Corp. CEO Alice Chang emphasized that Taiwan's market is too small for global scale software growth, meaning companies have to define products with international markets in mind from the outset. Perfect Corp's success in the beautytech and fashiontech sectors comes from deep domain knowledge, earning recognition as the only tech firm that truly understands beauty among global cosmetic brands.
She emphasized that whether serving the B2B or B2C markets, the theme of clarity and messaging for the product is critical to attracting and retaining global users with downloading and continued subscription.
CyberLink CEO J.H. Huang emphasized that Taiwanese society often misperceives software as "relatively simple," while achieving large-scale global success in software is in fact more difficult than in contract-based hardware manufacturing. Facing intense global competition and rapid industry change, he noted that international marketing requires significant investment. To strengthen competitiveness, Taiwan needs to build a sufficiently large software industry cluster that allows talent to gain real-world experience in business development, marketing, and product planning.
He also highlighted that deep collaboration with international partners, such as in AI PCs, is essential to enhancing the global competitiveness of Taiwan's software products.
Minister Lin highlighted, In his closing remarks, that Taiwan has established an unshakable position on the global stage thanks to its strong hardware industry foundation. This success was built decades ago by countless talented electronics engineers who gave up lucrative opportunities abroad to return to Taiwan and build a complete, competitive industrial ecosystem from scratch.
Today, Taiwan's software industry stands at a critical turning point, and Minister Lin urged software engineers to stay in Taiwan, join locally based companies with a global outlook. The goal is for Taiwan to eventually produce software companies that dominate the world, much like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) has in the semiconductor industry, within three to four decades or even sooner.
Source： Administrator for Digital Indusrties,moda
MOEA
MOEA DOIP
MOEA YouTube
Let's Juiker Together
