“The trend of returnee founders establishing startups in Southeast Asia began developing during the 2000s.”

Since the 2010s, there has been a notable increase in the number of millennial Vietnamese returnee entrepreneurs. This trend, referred to asthe repatriation movement, has been well documented [7].

The entrepreneurial ecosystem is still in its formative stages in the technology regions of India and China. These regions have seen important early entrepreneurial successes, and both have large technically skilled workforces willing to work very hard for relatively low wages. However, few US-educated emigrants returned to either India or China during the 1980s and 1990s. The technology recession triggered an upsurge in cross-regional entrepreneurship that, along with the emergence of a second generation of successful start-ups, should significantly strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem of each.

Growth in start-ups first took hold in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter “China”), India and Singapore, which saw their first large investments pouring in during 1999-2000.

An updated view was embraced at the turn of the century. This new view was articulated in the term “weiguo fuwu” and urged ‘flexible mobility’ instead of permanent return.

Taiwan and South Korea have benefited enormously from this trend. Migrants returning from overseas have played an important role in the economic development of Taiwan and South Korea (Saxenian, 2001, 2005).

During the take-off of the four Tigers, the economic potential of China and substantial parts of Southeast Asia was still dormant, and no one seriously expected China to become the world’s second economy within a third of a century and perhaps the dominant economic power in the not so distant future (Subramanian, 2011). … In due course, four countries with populations much larger than those of the four pioneering NIEs emerged as a second generation of Asian Tigers: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and, to a lesser degree, the Philippines. … More recently, as a result of their reforms, countries such as Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have become increasingly integrated in the regional and global economy.

These returnee entrepreneurs typically migrate from developing and emerging countries (e.g., China, India, Brazil, etc.) to advanced countries (e.g., often the U.S. or Western Europe) for higher education or professional training and then return to their home countries and exploit their international migratory experience by starting business ventures (Drori et al., 2009, Gruenhagen et al., 2020).

This study aims to examine the pivotal role of returnee entrepreneurs (REs) in fostering innovation within an emerging country context, using Philippines as the research setting.

Recent years have witnessed the return of individuals of Indian or Chinese origin from developed markets to their home countries to start new ventures.

Southeast Asia's young tech talent, long drawn to Silicon Valley to study and work, have begun returning to their home shores to build the next tech boom.