Timely focus on startups
ECONOMY Minister Rafizi Ramli recently announced the upcoming KL20 Summit 2024, which aims to unleash the potential of Kuala Lumpur’s and Malaysia’s startup ecosystem.
As a founder of a local startup myself, I applaud this effort and hope it will bear fruit.
Startup founders are a brave group taking on calculated risks and hard and challenging problems to create impact. They are agile and can move fast to bring new technology to the market.
By having a small group of talented people and with enough support and freedom to move, startups are key to solving the nation’s problems in education, healthcare and food security or complementing its already booming semiconductor industry.
We think there is more we can do to build a vibrant startup ecosystem in Malaysia. We believe that startups can attract talents if driven by a clear and worthy mission and with government and investor support, especially at the early stage.
We therefore call on the Economy Ministry and the government in general to focus on the following actionable areas:
1. Optimise grant funding mechanisms to integrate double blind or full transparency reviews for applications and review, moving grant incentives away from high capital expenditure/ Intellectual Property (IP) licensing towards IP generation and local content generation.
2. Enhance industry-academia collaborations by creating incentives in academia that reward innovation and commercialisation while reducing administrative and teaching loads for academics, researchers and staff who are building startups.
3. Commit one percent of government-linked investment companies’ (GLIC) assets under management (AUM) to diverse, firsttime managers investing in key focus areas such as deep technology, food security, AI and semiconductors.
4. Create opportunities for startups to tackle the challenges faced by ministries, agencies and GLIC/GLCS via small rapid grants along with paths for long-term procurement of the solutions developed.
5. Along similar lines, create tax incentives for startups to create high-impact R&D for participating GLIC/GLCS and corporates.
6. Set up a Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (similar to DARPA in the United States) to coordinate, oversee and fund R&D to address challenges faced by the country through radical innovations in key areas such as food, energy, border security, AI/ computing/data sovereignty and healthcare technology, and to do so in a focused and integrated way. There must be long-term funding support and a mission-driven governance structure to make it easy to recruit the best Malaysian talent worldwide to these causes.
I am encouraged that Rafizi has recognised our challenges and is committed to working with the ecosystem to provide the required factors for success.
Malaysia does not lack the regulatory frameworks and policies for this. We have the Malaysia 2030 Digital Economy Action Framework (MDEB 2030), the National Fourth Industrial Revolution Policy, the New Industrial Revolution Policy, the New Industrial Master Plan 2030 (NIMP 2030), the 12th Malaysia Plan and the AI Roadmap, as well as the newly announced Malaysian Venture Capital Roadmap 2024-2030 (MVCR).
As startup founders, we hope the KL20 Summit will be able to deliver a collaborative and interconnected ecosystem not just within the value chain but also among the startups, encouraging a risk-taking culture that celebrates tackling challenges as a rite of passage and global alliances that open doors to a larger market.
The Malaysian startup and innovation community is ready to work with the national leadership to address these challenges in the spirit of Malaysia Boleh!
WAN WARDATUL AMANI WAN SALIM Member of the National Digital Economy and 4IR Council (MEDI4RN) Member of the Malaysian Innovation Network for Advanced Technologies startup collective Kuala Lumpur