TOPIC 3: GENESIS OF INNOVATION

TOPIC 2: TYPE OF INNOVATION

TOPIC 1: PERSPECTIVE ON INNOVATION

COURSE ROAD MAP

Create, Own, and Sell a Bold New Idea

Let’s face it. Many of the survival ideas for business owners and managers in times of crisis we are hearing today can be summarized in just a few lines:

• Don’t stop investing
• Cut smart
• Help your customers
• Listen to your employees
• Have your organizatilon ready to charge when the economic tundra begins to thaw

So I perked up at Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s unique idea, expressed in her blog.

“Announce and own a grand concept.”

Sure, you might not be able to do anything about it now, she says. “But you will be well-prepared when markets recover. Ideas are cheap to begin to articulate and brand — and priceless once established.”

She points to IBM’s announcement in early November of its Smart Planet initiative, a proposal for Big Blue to lead a national forum on how technology such as smart networks can solve intractable problems like global warming. “With a modest communications effort,” Kanter writes, “IBM can put the ’smart planet’ idea on public policy agendas and ‘own’ an idea ripe for action whenever recovery occurs.”

Barack Obama is certainly taking this lesson to heart. Even before being sworn in to office he is building support (not always successfully) for a number of initiatives that would have had him laughed out of politics just an few months ago: trillion-dollar deficits; expansive/expensive public works programs; bailouts/loans for the financial and auto industries. Clearly Obama takes to heart the observation that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Your idea doesn’t have to be as bold as Smart Planet or as risky as massive bailouts. It could be a plan for a new department initiative, a rethinking of a company goal or value, a new method for encouraging employee ideas around big problems. Now is the time to identify it, own it, sell it, and be ready to push it forward when the time is right.

Presentation

Assessment

Assessments for this subject is as follows:

Assessments	Percent
Innovation & Marketing Project	50%
Quiz	10%
Final Exam	40%
Total	100%

News 1

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).