25 February 2011

QIK Conference Focuses on Innovation

Story by Shamini Darshni with pictures by Fotoprime

“One of the few drivers of innovation is always a crisis of sorts. When backed against a wall, you are forced to innovate.”

Special Innovation Unit (UNIK) Chief Executive Officer Dato’ Dr Kamal Jit Singh drove home the point on innovation culture, stressing that Malaysia needed to increase its level of innovation to compete with big players like China and India.

“Countries like ours are being left alone. Unless we alter our thinking and how we do things, we will be nowhere,” he said at the opening of the 10th International Research Conference on Quality, Innovation and Knowledge Management.

The three-day conference was jointly organised by the Department of Management, Monash University Australia, and the School of Business, Monash University Sunway Campus. It was supported by universities from Australia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, as well as government and business associations.

Malaysia, Dato’ Dr Kamal Jit said, was competing with countries like China which produced 6.1 million graduates last year, while yearly, India produces over three million.

“Competing with countries like these is extremely difficult,” he said.

He cited a study in Bangalore which showed that 65 per cent of slum dwellers chose to live in trying conditions to save for their children’s education.

“When there is no hunger, innovation is stifled … Many countries need to learn that innovation is a different game and we have to learn new rules,” Dato’ Dr Kamal Jit said.

One of the innovation’s biggest failures, which he tagged as a “common sense issue”, was not enlisting people who questioned assumptions.

Academics and universities like Monash University, he said, could help address the situation by encouraging their students to question what had worked before.

“In innovation, we back the wrong people – people with similar thoughts – which are the wrong people. In innovation, we have to back the ‘wrong’ people. When you back diversity, things change,” he said to some 100 delegates from Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia.

The conference took on an industry-driven outlook – focusing on innovation, quality and knowledge applications that would be useful in manufacturing and service sectors.

Dato’ Dr Kamal Jit said that catching up with developed countries would be impossible although Malaysia had a niche in the manufacturing area and was beginning to export knowledge to countries like China.

But it won’t be long, he added, before the competition caught up.

In his speech, conference chair Prof Amrik Sohal said this was the third time the event was being held in Malaysia.

The first conference in 1994 had focused on total quality management, he said, but over time, had necessitated a revolution as companies found themselves needing to improve on various aspects including quality systems.

“We are here to learn how developed countries are leap-frogging, and share knowledge. If we don’t share knowledge and experience, we won’t make very much progress in the human condition,” Prof Amrik said.

Conference co-chair Prof Pervaiz Khalid Ahmed emphasised that the notion of innovation occurring only in the West no longer held true.

“Innovation is also occurring in developing nations and this will trickle up to developed markets. This is already starting to dramatically change the global landscape, as developed and developing countries vigorously compete to capture slices of the innovation space.”

As part of the conference, a two-day doctoral workshop was held to assist current and future students with issues such as methodology, writing up theses and thesis examinations.