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MSC Malaysia Succeeds In Creating Bumi Technopreneurs

Friday, 22/02/2008

Bernama

Tengku Noor Shamsiah Tengku Abdullah

MSC Malaysia has succeeded in its mission to bring about greater Bumiputera involvement in the information & communications technology (ICT) field through its programmes. Chief executive officer Datuk Badlisham Ghazali of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the agency responsible for developing MSC Malaysia, said in the two years since the Bumiputera Technopreneurs Development (BITE) and Technopreneur Academy (TAP) programmes were introduced, 464 MSC Malaysia status Bumiputera companies have emerged among the 1,900 MSC Malaysia status firms. While small in number when compared to the overall total, this is in fact a 40 percent increase from previously, he stressed. According to Badlisham, MDeC has taken several measures to ensure that MSC Malaysia contributes significantly to the goal of making Malaysia a developed nation based on a knowledge economy by 2020. "Towards this end, one focus of MSC Malaysia is to increase the Bumiputera participation in the ICT sector through various programmes that not only evolve young Bumiputera entrepreneurs but also improve the competitiveness of the existing Bumiputera ICT firms," he told Bernama in an interview in his office here. Badlisham said BITE and TAP were established in 2005 with the collaboration of several other parties to encourage greater Bumiputera entrepreneurship. He pointed out that besides content, creative multimedia is becoming the focus of Bumiputera entrepreneurs, especially among the younger ones, such as Les Copaque Sdn Bhd, which has created animation for the international market, like Geng The Series and Upih & Lilin. Les Copaque, formed by four Multimedia University of Malaysia(MMU) graduates, has won international competitions with its animation products. To unearth young talent, Badlisham said, MSC Malaysia has incubators such as those at Kuala Lumpur Sentral to help draw up business plans, obtain pre seed funding and content development, in line with the objective of getting more Bumiputeras and graduates to move into ICT entrepreneurship. MSC Malaysia Cybercity in Penang, according to him, has set up a Master Incubator Centre with the cooperation of the Penang Development Corporation (PDC) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). It already has a Business Lab and a Tech Lab. At the pre-university level, MSC Malaysia has a campaign promoting ICT as a career of choice ongoing since last year to encourage school leavers to pick ICT courses when they enter universities and to ease any concerns that there are few job opportunities in ICT. Badlisham said that under its technopreneur development programme, cooperation has been established with the Entrepreneur & Cooperative Development Ministry and the various state development corporations to help evolve and encourage ICT entrepreneurship. TAP began in 2005 in six states - Perak, Johor, Melaka, Terengganu, Sabah and Sarawak. He said that in its second phase, TAP is expanding to Penang, Kedah, Pahang, Perlis, Negeri Sembilan and Kelantan. On pre seed funding, Badlisham said the government has allocated RM80 million to help Bumiputera entrepreneurs, and so far RM14 million has been disbursed to 42 companies. Also, the government and MDeC are aiming to create at least 400 Bumiputera ICT entrepreneurs in the next five years under a programme that has been contracted to Alam Teknokrat Sdn Bhd (Skali).