Glocalising Globalisation
Dr Wilson Tay
Chief Executive Officer
Malaysian Institute of Management

Released by: The Edge
Date: The Week of May 29, 2006

Globalisation is not new to Malaysia. Its influence had been evident for decades even before it became the buzzword of the present millennium. Today, the 2005 A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalisation Index indicates that Malaysia has jumped a rung from 20 to 19 among the world's most globalised nations. The index encompassed 62 nations that account for 96% of the world's GDP and 85% of its population.

Nevertheless, some controversy shrouds globalisation. Anti-globalisation supporters want to put the brakes on globalisation, saying that it serves only to enrich the big, foreign nations while depriving locals of what is rightfully due to them.

Frank-Jürgen Richter, former Director of the World Economic Forum and author of Let's Globalise Globalisation, says "Globalisation cannot be regarded as truly global and successful while a large proportion of the world's population remain unable to reap the benefits. Attempts to increase globalisation in developing countries have so far proved directly disadvantageous for less-qualified sections of the population in the industrialised nations." He, however, tempers this with the statement that "globalisation should not, and cannot, be stopped."

How, then, can social inequality be redressed?

Going glocal

One possible way would be to glocalise globalisation - deftly balancing the imperative to go global while ramping up the nation's domestic capacity to meet the demands accruing from globalisation initiatives.

For instance, Malaysia aims to be the destination of choice for health tourism and outsourcing from the more advanced nations. Yet, are our people competent and prepared enough to handle the onslaught of this global outsourcing stream or health-seeking tourists should that become a torrent? The fact is that coordination and cohesiveness between vision and execution might be lacking. Fortunately, the Government has recognised our "first-world infrastructure, third-world mentality" and is taking steps to address this matter.

Concerted human capital development

Human capital development is a national imperative, a crucial step forward in the glocalising process. Both Budget 2006 and the Ninth Malaysia Plan (9MP) pinpoint the need to raise human capital development several notches. Budget 2006's theme "Strengthening Resilience, Meeting Challenges", stresses enhancing national resilience to meet emerging external challenges and global competition.

The focus is on the development of the soft infrastructure, including human capital capability and the management and organisational systems. Under the 9MP the educational, training and lifelong learning delivery systems will be revamped.

Addressing "unemployability"

Glocalising globalisation necessitates the correct assessment of our own local needs in a global arena to minimise the "unemployable syndrome". Getting youths to adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset will help ensure our graduates become more business savvy, making the education process much more market-driven.

From 2006 to 2010, lifelong learning programmes will be expanded and the creation of an entrepreneurial society facilitated. Meanwhile, tertiary institutions will be tweaked to meet the needs of the marketplace while an innovative society with strong Science & Technology capabilities will be encouraged. Some RM45.1 billion will be allocated to implement all these.

Driving commercialisation of R&D

Another vital area of concern is the chasm that still separates the Research and Development (R&D) units of the universities from the industry players. In his paper last year entitled "Commercialisation of UTM Research Findings - Problems and Challenges", Universiti Teknologi Malaysia's Associate Professor Dr Amran Md Rasli revealed that most R&D activities are funded by governmental agencies, with "only 0.68% university R&D funding coming from the industry compared with the more advanced countries such as Canada (11.8%), Germany (7.5%), the UK (6.2%) and the US (5.5%)."

Malaysia's commercialisation efforts, he adds, have been quite modest with low number of patents - only 8.8 patent applications per population million compared with Australia (546), the US (623) and South Korea (1,561). "Compounding the situation is the commercialisation movement, which has not resulted in any significant licensing revenue for the Malaysian universities - no R&D output from Malaysian universities have been commercialised yet on a national scale." Only 5.1 % of the 5,232 R&D projects implemented during Seventh and Eighth Malaysia Plans were considered as having commercialisation potential!

Amran further says that despite huge R&D funding from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation for the Seventh (RM86 million) and Eighth Malaysia (RM130 million) Malaysia Plans, UTM conducted a record 724 research projects while the tangible outcomes only included 102 invention disclosures, 34 filed patents, one intellectual property granted, 107 national awards and 64 international awards in the past five years. Embarrassingly, only two projects had achieved "fully commercialised status" and even then, both did not perform up to the expectations of the university.

Matching industry with research

Researchers appear to be doing research for research's sake, regardless of whether it is marketable. Current laws, too, do not encourage government researchers to be commercial-centric; in fact, they discourage it for fear of taking the attention away from the teaching role. Advanced countries, in contrast, spur their academic faculty to work and assist the industry sector so that the end products are skewed for the consumers.

South Korea grasped this very early on. It realised that local industries with the knowledge must link up with neighbouring colleges and universities so that this can be the engine for regional development. South Korea set about reducing the chasm between the universities and industries by fostering a University-Industry Research-centred (UIR) programme involving an initial 10 hub universities. It also called for school enterprises in public universities where the sale of goods and services produced in the classes are encouraged.

A campus headquarters for UIR cooperation was also established to directly control all UIR activities, programmes and funding while a reward system for professors was introduced, which favours professors with hands-on commercial involvement, and filed for patents as well as collected fees on their patents. The university's curriculum is also developed in tune with business demands and requests.

Some tentative steps in this direction have been taken by a few of the braver local universities. It will only snowball if they are officially sanctioned. The government's political and directional will should be directed towards ensuring that the divergent paths traditionally taken by the universities and industry must finally and fruitfully converge instead of continuing to run parallel. Only if this is done can Malaysia successfully ride the tectonic shifts of a truly global economy.

Dr Wilson Tay is the CEO of the Malaysian Institute of Management (MIM).