From the roads of Jambi to the suburban neighborhoods of Surabaya and skylines of Jakarta, Against All Odds captures the diverse cityscapes of Indonesia.

But beyond these snapshots is a common thread of the reality of digital innovation in the country.

(1) Digital innovation still outpaces behavior shifts.

While many automation solutions have emerged from startups in Indonesia, this emergence has still outpaced overall behavioral shifts (e.g., using a centralized data logging software or adopting ERP-related solutions), especially when the short-term benefits are not as clear cut (e.g., new behaviors like QR-based payments have had less friction). It becomes incumbent on those building these solutions to more effectively design and communicate the impact of their work to target users.

Against All Odds captures this struggle in the story of Carro Indonesia CEO and Chief Scientist Bryan as he makes it his mission to drive adoption of the solutions he introduced to the global used car marketplace in the country.

“More than his ties to the market, Bryan (Carro Indonesia CEO) also recognized the potential for Indonesia to develop even further, precisely because of the inherent challenges of driving automation in the market.

As an excerpt from the book version of documentary shares: 

“Indonesia is a country with a large Gini coefficient. There is a wide disparity between standard of living as well as education level…Most people are people of habit. They tend to do the same thing the same way. They are not so receptive to change. So we empower change. We allow them to see a different future. That’s part of our vision. We have to be persistent in driving our vision, and we have to be flexible in overcoming the challenges that our staff face in applying these changes.” – Bryan Tan, CEO of Carro Indonesia, Chief Scientist of Carro Group

When Bryan moved to the role of CEO of Indonesia, Tiffany (Bryan’s hire in Carro Singapore’s data science team) also transferred to the Indonesia office to continue their work, except this time focusing a lot more on ensuring the technology’s implementation in her home country.

“So this automatic pricing system project is what actually brought me [back] to Indonesia in the first place. I wanted to take one step further to socialize and implement this project to the local ops team in Indonesia and make sure it’s a valuable feature for the team here. As an agent of change, it’s always very hard because people are used to what they’re doing.” – Tiffany Widjaja, Pricing Analyst at Carro Indonesia”

(2) The flip side of a big market is that digital innovation is still concentrated in a few key cities within Java.

Digital transformation also remains concentrated in the region close to Jakarta metropolis, where the influx of talent, capital, and other resources for building tech has converged. This reinforces the reality that Southeast Asia’s digitalization rush as one that is capita/metro-driven.

In Against All Odds, we learn from following SuperApp’s journey that they are one of few startups that made their home in East Indonesia and thrived as a result of this positioning.

As an excerpt from the book version of documentary shares: 

““East Indonesia actually contributes to 40 percent of the total GDP in Indonesia. That is actually very massive. However, this market is underserved. There is a huge price disparity here. There is [also] a low selection of products here. That’s why at Super, we actually emerged to be the first mover to provide wider access to goods to people in this area and also persevered to solve the supply chain issue here.” – Debeasinta Budiman, VP of Strategic Partnerships at SuperApp

This irony (and opportunity) in the economic development of East Java is best painted by Surabaya’s scenery. Surabaya is rapidly filling up with all the infrastructure reflective of economic growth, with some of the largest malls and real estate developments. Yet across the road from new commercial centers and “CBDs” being built are rows of rundown houses and warungs.

This irony is also important to factor into how SuperApp was able to expand into a private label business from just a social commerce platform.”

(3) Digital innovation has come a long way in a few years, but it isn’t the panacea to all structural inefficiencies.

As challenging as it can be to foster behavioral shifts around technology adoption, the pace of digitalization in the country has come a long way in the past decade. That said, there’s still a lot more work that needs to be done.

As much as Pinhome, for example, has redefined what it means to buy property in Indonesia for first-time homebuyers, there are still key behaviors and processes that are harder to automate or transform than others.

As an excerpt from the book version of documentary shares: 

““It was really tough trying to get into the industry, right? You don’t get that respect immediately. E-commerce has been around for a long time, but nobody thought that e-commerce for real estate was possible. They laughed at it. 

Four to five years on at Pinhome, I believe we have digitized 80 percent of the journey. What’s left are the two pieces of the journey that are just very difficult to otherwise digitize because customers like to be on the ground and that is property viewing or visitation. Title signing processes are also still pen and paper, but apart from those two journeys, everything else is digitized.””

(4) Indonesia’s collaboration with regional and global players in other markets on cutting-edge digital innovation remains a competitive advantage for the country, but the mass adoption question also still remains unanswered.

In recent years, Indonesia has leveraged its natural competitive advantages (natural resources, geography) to attract global players to develop more resources for digital innovation in the country. The likes of Elon Musk and Jensen Huang have made trips to the country in recent years, representing the growing interest in developing the country’s EV and AI industries respectively. This has been followed or paralleled by the development of data centers or EV manufacturing in the country.

In Against All Odds, we see this cross-border confluence of innovation and market opportunity through Fazz with the opportunity of blockchain-based payments technology from StraitsX in Singapore meeting the massive distribution of financial services in Indonesia through Fazz Agen.

As an excerpt from the book version of documentary shares: 

“It helped that Hendra would also take Tianwei to visit Payfazz agent stores, where the Singaporean founder would observe and understand why there were so many unbanked in Indonesia. Tianwei realized it was not just because of a lack of physical banks, but the very environment of banks locked out Indonesians who did not feel comfortable having to “dress up” for the bank. This divide was deeply embedded in the socio-cultural psyche.

“The beauty is I can bring this high tech solution into the hands of kids or the small mom and pop shop owners in the streets of Indonesia. But then the moonshot technology is being built in Xfers. When you bring that together, that’s when you bring the biggest impact to the customers. A customer that is not tech savvy can suddenly access a technology as sophisticated as stablecoins. They can do cross border remittance enabled by blockchain technology.” – Hendra Kwik, CEO and co-founder of Fazz”

Even as Indonesia continues to attract the interest of global players to develop innovation industries, the question still remains of how massive adoption of frontier technologies will be in the long-term and how definitive these changes will be.

But one only has to take the big picture and see just how much industries like financial services have evolved because of fintechs, for example, or how the informal services sector has matured in no small part thanks to tech startups forcing players in an industry to raise the bar.