Received commitment of sizeable allocation from govt to improve MRANTIWhether you like him or dislike him, and his stormy two year stint as the non-executive chairman of Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation made sure that the ecosystem had one opinion or the other, the one thing that Dr Rais Hussin is not, is boring.
Bullish choice of words for an executive who has vowed, “we will not spend on anything that has no outcome and impact on society and the nation.” And to emphasise this promise he shared an encounter during his first official public engagement as Chairman of MDEC in late 2020, attending a big launch the agency had at a low cost public housing area with then Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin in attendance.
Rais basically outlined to the Ministry of Finance and Economy Ministry where the 28-year old park stood in terms of its appeal as an innovation centre for investors in its current ageing state versus the ambitions the government had for it and made the case that proper investments were needed to spruce up MRANTI to be attractive as a world-class innovation hub. So what happened?
The use of 4IR is no coincidence as Rais has co-authored a book in 2019 ‘4IR – Reinventing A Nation”. He also shared that MRANTI has been appointed by Mosti as an agency responsible to facilitate addressing food security using 4IR, “so we are working very very hard in this area because Malaysia’s food bill in 2023 was around RM72 billion, excluding excluding dried and processed food.”
No doubt these are ambitious goals for Rais and MRANTI, bearing in mind the reality that the pace of innovation in the country cannot be moved much by the agency on its own, with its model of partnering startups, the private sector and academia in their innovative pursuits while enticing regional and international corporates to locate their innovation centres at MRANTI, leveraging its 686 acre landbank to earn revenue.