Busyweekly-logoThe Chinese business magazine, Busy Weekly published a cover story entitled “Innovation is the key to achieving high-income nation status within seven years” recently. I was one of the interviewees featured along with Mr. Bob Chua (Chairman of Virtual Investment Circle), Dato’ Saw Choo Boon (Vice-President of FMM), and Mr. Michael Lai (CEO of Packet One).

 Below are excerpts from the article containing mainly my contributions to the article:

 The late Steve Jobs said, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

 Malaysians are lacking in innovation where the domestic entrepreneurial environment is not satisfactory. This has contributed to Malaysia’s poor competitiveness and lack of pricing positioning compared with other countries, causing a great disadvantage to Malaysia. Where has our creativity and innovation gone?

Innovation is the priority

Tan Sri Clement Hii shared his opinion with The Busy Weekly: “For the business industry in Malaysia to achieve vision 2020 in less than seven years’ time, more innovative people are required in various strata of society. We have no other choice but to be creative and innovative to avoid being stuck in the middle-income trap.”

 Creativity and innovation does not equate invention. In an enterprise environment, one can be creative and innovative through new product research and development,  sales and marketing strategies, pricing, product presentation, methods of financing and fund raising, and so on.

 Creativity requires constant improvements

Coincidentally, a recent cover story in The Economist also discussed the topic of ‘innovation.’ Its cover is very interesting: it shows Rodin’s famous statue, the Thinker, sitting on a white toilet bowl thinking “Will we invent something as useful as a toilet bowl in the future?”

 Clement Hii reminded that the modem flush toilet we are using was not invented by a genius overnight; rather it took more than 2,800 years of continuous improvements to achieve.

He pointed out that behind a great business success there is always a leader who can envision a market for an invention or innovation. Microsoft’s Bill Gates was the first person who attempted to bring the desktop computer to the market, but it was Steve Jobs, with his marketing intuition who transformed the desktop computer into a tablet, which created an unlimited demand and became more functional and easy to carry around.

”I believe there are many other young minds who have an innovative mind like the late Steve Jobs”, said Hii.

In Part 2, we cover the major culprits causing the lack of innovation in Malaysia.