LETTERS: Malaysia’s innovation problem is not a shortage of ideas. The core challenge is the gap between R&D outputs and the ability of local technology to penetrate real markets.
Malaysia spends only one per cent of GDP on R&D, but the private sector’s share of R&D spending is disproportionately low, meaning the engine of commercial innovation is running well below capacity.
Malaysia ranks first globally in high-tech exports and imports, eighth in science and engineering graduates. Yet its knowledge and technology outputs rank 32nd, and its creative goods exports are strong while its own intellectual property generation lags.
Malaysia is exceptionally good at making things designed elsewhere. It is far less good at designing things the world wants to buy. We need to treat innovation as an industry, with upstream, midstream, and downstream, each with dedicated capital, specialised labour, and performance metrics. Malaysia has pieces of this chain.
What it lacks is the connective tissue that turns pieces into a system. If Malaysia was serious about innovation as an industry, three things would change immediately.
First, the metrics would change. An industry measures revenue per researcher, licensing income as a percentage of R&D spend, and the survival rate of spin-offs after five years. Malaysia should publish these numbers annually and hold agencies accountable for them.
Second, the money would follow the market. Malaysia’s public R&D spending is concentrated in government research institutes and universities.
China’s policy directs that projects with clear industrial application be led by enterprises.
Malaysia could adopt a simple rule: any public R&D grant above a certain threshold must have a named industry partner with skin in the game, co-funding at least 30 per cent and committing to a first-right-of-refusal on the resulting IP. This would force researchers to talk to customers before they write their proposals.
Third, Malaysia needs dedicated prototyping and pilot manufacturing facilities that operate on industry timelines, not academic ones.
MRANTI’s shared testing facilities are a start, but they must be run like a contract manufacturer, with turnaround times measured in weeks and pricing that reflects commercial rates, not subsidised ones.
Malaysia does not need an innovation policy. It needs to stop pretending that innovation is a separate sector that can be stimulated by occasional funding injections and then left to its own devices.
The question is whether Malaysia is willing to do what an industrial approach to innovation actually requires: less ceremony, more enterprise leadership; fewer grants, more contracts; less publication, more product.
Until then, innovation in Malaysia will remain what it has always been — an accidental investment, generously funded and chronically under-industrialised.
PROFESSOR DATUK DR AHMAD IBRAHIM
Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy, UCSI University