Assessing Regional Competitive Advantage with the 3S Model
MIT REAP believes that the key to successfully developing an innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem in a region lies in core stakeholders collaborating to formulate the right strategy to effectively advance ecosystem development, known as the 3S model. Core stakeholders must include five types of roles: government, universities, enterprises, venture capital, and entrepreneurs. Local advantages in agriculture, healthcare, research and natural resources do not automatically translate into new companies, industries and job opportunities; systems thinking is needed to connect stakeholders driving change, using objective qualitative and quantitative methods to assess strengths, formulate strategies and take action. Through approaches covering regional advantage, innovation capacity and entrepreneurial capacity, the program helps participating regions reassess conditions and identify bottlenecks. More than ninety cities and regions worldwide have participated to date, while in Taiwan participants include New Taipei City and Hualien County, which joined the 11th cohort from 2024 to 2026.
Hualien Narrows Focus to Agri-Food-Care-Medical Value Chain
Joining MIT REAP is not about finding a replicable success formula, but about re-understanding what one has and what one lacks. Taking Hualien as an example, it already has the Tzu Chi medical system, research resources and technological capabilities from Donghua University to the Industrial Technology Research Institute, and what truly needs to be added is a mechanism for resources to move toward validation, entrepreneurship, capital and markets, forming a continuously operating innovation translation mechanism. Team Hualien connects stakeholders including county government, enterprises, universities, investors and entrepreneurs, including the Digital Economy and Industry Development Association, the Hualien County Farmers' Association, the Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, Tzu Chi Medical, the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Donghua University and the Park City Hotel Group. After two years of assessment, the direction has converged on Farm to Health and Wellbeing, starting from agriculture toward health and wellbeing, linking an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem spanning agriculture, food, care and medicine.
From Smart Agriculture Toward Clinical Validation
Team Hualien plans to move from smart agriculture and non-toxic Chinese herbal medicine, to vegetarian food, wellness cuisine and nutritional supplements, and further to medical biotechnology and clinical validation. The focus is not on creating new industries disconnected from the locality, but on forming scattered agricultural, health and medical strengths into an interconnected value chain, echoing the wellbeing economy's emphasis on innovation returning to human health, quality of life and long-term local wellbeing. At the Hualien REAP Forum 2026, MIT REAP co-founder Scott Stern stressed starting from one's own strengths, noting that regions need not copy Silicon Valley; instructor Lars Frølund used mission-oriented innovation to address how to narrow a vision into problems worth concentrating resources on; other international speakers also offered insights from community, ecosystem and wellbeing economy perspectives. Teams from Edmonton, Canada, the Republic of Botswana, and the Kano-Jigawa region of Nigeria also joined the exchange, establishing follow-up connections.
Launching a Standing Translation Mechanism in 2026
MIT REAP spans two years and includes four workshops, with teams required to return to their regions between workshops for action phases, from collecting innovation capacity and entrepreneurial capacity data, building an ecosystem map, to identifying niches, drafting strategies, then identifying key challenges requiring priority breakthroughs, further taking action and evaluating results. All regions ultimately must face how to keep cross-domain collaboration and innovation translation mechanisms in place locally after the program ends. Hualien's next phase will move from proposing strategies to building mechanisms, with a planned regional technology commercialization and venture-building platform positioned as the institutional backbone for follow-up actions, scheduled to launch in 2026, expand in 2027, and move toward standing operation by 2030, connecting opportunity identification, validation and research support, startup incubation, capital and market linkage to business growth, and exploring smart agriculture, Chinese herbal medicine, food innovation and youth entrepreneurship cultivation through physical sites, bringing technologies into real-world environments for testing and refinement before pursuing commercialization.