Recent forum on innovation organized by TBY features in local media

A recent innovation forum organized by The Business Year and Make It Right—an NGO powered by Brickfields Asia College—received wide attention in the local media. Most attention went to the keynote address by Dato’ Sri Idris Jala, CEO of the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU), who is responsible for the nation’s transformation agenda to become a high-income state by 2020.

During his speech, he displayed statistics that indicated Malaysia has truly closed the middle-income gap and that it was well on its way to becoming a high-income nation, a large part because the balance in public versus private investments had shifted from 60-40 to 40-60 in the last five years.

Raja Singham, Managing Director of Brickfields Asia and the founder of Make It Right, strongly emphasized the role of education in empowering people and as a driver for inclusive sustainable growth. Singham is well respected for his initiatives to broaden access to education, for example with EduNation, a free online study platform.

The Sun daily focused on the panel discussion on innovation and quoted Datuk Phang Ah Tong’s call on Malaysian firms to strengthen product technology and stay competitive, stating competition is not just regional but global. Wan Latiff Wan Musa, meanwhile, emphasized on the role of SMEs to drive innovation

The event was reported by the largest English-language papers as well as a number of Malaysian ones. Weekly magazine The Edge did a full-page background analysis of the claims made by Dato’ Sri Idris Jala that Malaysia was out of the middle-income trap.