‘ENTREPRENEURS CAN SPARK GREATNESS’
Futurist Dr Michio Kaku believes Malaysia can be the next big thing in entrepreneurship, writes BEATRICE NITA JAY
ENTREPRENEURS are the missing “match” that will ignite the spark to make Malaysia achieve greatness. Futurist, theoretical physicist and bestselling author Dr Michio Kaku, who was in Kuala Lumpur recently to speak at the Global Entrepreneurship Community Summit 2017 (GE Community 2017), said Malaysia, as a young and fresh nation, had the potential to be next big thing.
“When I think of Malaysia, I think of a gigantic booster rocket that is about to take off.
“You have all the ingredients here. A stable population with no civil war. You have young people who want to work. It (Malaysia) is young, dynamic and energetic and the government is sympathetic. All the ingredients are in place, except we need a spark.
“We need a match to set this rocket off, and what is this match? Entrepreneurs,” he said after the first day of the GE Community 2017 last Tuesday.
The summit, which took place for two days at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, was aimed at building a global entrepreneurship ecosystem that would work to anticipate market demand and opportunity gaps to innovate different sectors, and in turn, drive entrepreneurship and the country’s growth.
Themed “Designing the Future”, the summit centred on current and emerging needs of developing and developed communities to design ideas through intentional action and participation by the community.
Kaku, who was one of the invited speakers, said Malaysia needed more entrepreneurs to create the vision, imagination and energy, and GE Community 2017 was a stepping stone to drive it in creating a new industry.
“Malaysia has the talent, but more nourishing needs to be done. It’s a mindset. It is not natural to many societies and cultures to be innovative and to make waves.
“Therefore, we need to cultivate the spirit. In many cultures, it is not good to make mistakes, but entrepreneurs have to make mistakes as that is what makes them successful. We need to go against the grain.”
The co-founder of the string field theory said more young people needed to be trained to take up leadership.
When asked if there were differences between innovators and entrepreneurs he had met globally in comparison with the ones he met here, Kaku said no.
“I see that the human spirit is identical for all in this group. There is no one group that has monopoly in innovation and that is the beauty of technology.
“There is no one country that can say that it has a monopoly over anything, as any country can start or create something new, like artificial intelligence.”
Kaku said he believed that one day, Silicon Valley would become obsolete and a new Silicon Valley would open up, but not necessarily in the United States.
Kaku said the future had surprised him many times.
“Sometimes, the future grows faster than we predict. When my first book came out, I predicted that we will have personal genomics by 2020. But now, you can have personalised (medicine) tomorrow if you want. I was off track by a few years, but the good news is, we are moving faster than I predicted.”
To aspiring scientists and physicists, Kaku said they should open up their minds to learn things on their own.
“I learned most of my science outside of the classroom because I noticed I rarely had teachers who knew what they were talking about or tried to make it interesting.
“My daughter once took a regional exam (in geology) at the New York State University. The moment I read the exam books, I felt like ripping them apart. They were all about memorisation and things you would forget the day after the exam.
“My daughter came up to me and asked me why would anyone want to become a scientist, and I felt humiliated. Junior high school and high school are the greatest killers of science.
“Millions of children want to head for these schools and if we don’t change the system, we will lose them,” said Kaku, who did most of his scientific-related readings on his own.
He ended the interview by saying that his favourite thing about Malaysia was the youthfulness and energy among its people.