LETTERS: Malaysia is ranked 36 out of 132 countries in the 2021 Global Innovation Index (GII), according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
Among Southeast Asian countries, the index is led by Singapore (8), followed by Malaysia, Thailand (43), Vietnam (44), the Philippines (51), Brunei (82) and Indonesia (87).
The challenge issued by the Science, Technology and Innovation minister recently to create five unicorn companies (privately held start-ups) within the next five years comes at the right time for a push towards high-impact commercialisation.
However, looking at the number of such companies in the region, Malaysia is behind Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, despite being ranked higher in GII.
This is a critical indicator for the government and its agencies to re-evaluate our start-up landscape and the effectiveness of current initiatives in identifying high-potential start-up companies.
Streamlining the process to address these gaps within the start-up and commercialisation ecosystem is crucial before unicorn start-ups can exist in Malaysia.
Therefore, it is recommended that a centralised proposal submission centre be established to ease technopreneurs seeking help and fundings, cutting short the application preparation process.
Evaluation panels should consist of technopreneurs who understand the market requirements and challenges of business owners.
Reducing the turnover time in proposal preparation will attract more companies to apply and provide the agencies with a large pool of potential companies to grow, from small tech start-ups to medium-sized corporations.
This is what people in the field of innovation design say — fail fast, succeed faster. Evaluation by the right panel is crucial to ensure the potentials of each company are not being overlooked that may cause the loss of opportunity for the country.
Most evaluation panel members are academicians or industry representatives who had never run a company with their life savings at risk.
So, a large gap of expectations exists during the evaluation process, making it a painful experience for small start-ups to drive their inventions locally. Consequently, some have resorted to relocate their operations to other countries.
To ensure the proposed technology and innovations are adopted and local start-up companies remain competitive, support and collaboration between government agencies and large industry players is a must.
These are my recommendations:
A CENTRALISED pool of industrial challenges provided by large corporations should be made publicly accessible for innovative companies to generate solutions.
This will foster the innovation mindset among local companies in inventing new solutions to industrial problems, hence reducing our dependence on foreign technologies.
EMPHASIS on schemes should not be limited to the latest in-trend themes. There are other market potentials in other themes to be looked at that can provide high market growth, while providing a track record for local companies to secure overseas markets.
AN incentive should be introduced to large corporations to collaborate with local technopreneurs, instead of foreign consultants, in developing and adopting the technology to mature as per industry standards, and;
NURTURE an innovative mindset and effective start-up ecosystem. Without involving collaboration between all relevant parties to share risks and addressing the expectation gaps in the application process, future entrepreneurs will be at risk and may continue to lag behind neighbouring countries with more talents leaving Malaysia.
If we manage to create the right landscape to enable small start-ups to thrive, even if we do not breed a unicorn company, Malaysia could retain these talents to boost its efforts towards becoming a high-income nation.
Innovating the ecosystem and celebrating local talents are some of the key steps in ensuring our start-up companies are globally competitive and remain on the right path towards becoming unicorn companies.
DR MOHD ZULHILMI PAIZ ISMADI
Telok Panglima Garang, Selangor
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times