Story

I'm Van Tan Nguyen: a PhD researcher in Tainan, a former digital marketer, a photographer, and, under the name Phong, someone who writes poems at night.

I grew up in Vietnam and studied business at Foreign Trade University in Hanoi. My first job, in 2016, was the social media plan for Muong Thanh, the largest private hotel chain in Southeast Asia. In the autumn of 2018 I left Vietnam for the first time and moved to Singapore to run digital campaigns for UNIQLO: a new culture, a new language at work, a lot of homesickness, and some of the best friends I have. Then came Taiwan, an MBA, two years building Telin's marketing for the Vietnamese market from Taipei, and a stretch back home leading business development at Italisa.

Somewhere along the way one question kept coming back:

Why do some companies turn new technology into a real advantage, while others only add cost and complexity?

In 2024 I moved to Tainan to look for the answer properly.

What I research

At the Digital Empowerment Lab, National Cheng Kung University, I study how digital technology changes the way firms compete.

• Digital servitization How product companies move into services built on digital tools, and what that does to their business model.
• Digital transformation What actually changes in processes and operations when a firm goes digital, beyond the buzzwords.
• Digital innovation How new digital products and ways of working become a source of competitiveness.
• Firm performance Measuring how efficiently firms turn resources into results, with data analytics and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).

I want research to be useful to the people running businesses, and practice to make research sharper. Some of that thinking is in Research, and in plainer words in Servitization, in plain words and What DEA actually measures.

Before the lab

Years in industry taught me to read numbers and people at the same time.

• +115% Site traffic year on year at UNIQLO Singapore, with revenue up 130%.
• 28% Share of all e-commerce revenue driven by the daily retention campaigns I ran at UNIQLO.
• +30% Growth of the client base at Italisa, with long-term contracts from multinational clients.
• +15% Client retention at Italisa, through closer relationships and tailored solutions.

The whole path is on the Timeline.

Outside the lab

I take photographs. It is how I slow down and actually look at the places I live in and pass through: temple festivals and night streets in Taiwan, mountain temples and cherry-blossom roads in Japan, incense villages and rice terraces at home in Vietnam. They are all in Photos.

Since 2020 I have also written poems and short essays in Vietnamese as Phong is writing, a page that has grown to around 9,000 readers. Its motto is still the one I try to live by: Follow your inner moonlight. Don't hide the madness. A selection now lives here, under Poetry and Thoughts.

And I run. One New Year's marathon in Taiwan with my teachers turned into a habit: a half marathon in Saigon, and many evening runs under the moon in Tainan. I wrote about why in Run after your shadow, look at the moon.

Languages

• Vietnamese Native.
• English Professional working proficiency (IELTS 7.5, TOEIC 950).
• Chinese Limited working proficiency, improving one conversation at a time.