MDeC rolls out JFDI.Asia-powered ‘accelerator lite’ programme

• To help Malaysian early-stage ICT startups by mapping out founders’ goals, current reality and options
• Also to connect them to national and international mentors and investors, hope to build out ecosystem

MULTIMEDIA Development Corporation (MDeC) has announced a pilot programme that it said would “help local ICT startups break through barriers to growth.”
 
The MSC Malaysia Startup Accelerator Lite programme will be delivered by local partners around Malaysia and facilitated by JFDI.Asia, MDeC said in a statement.
 
The programme aims to help Malaysian early-stage ICT startups unlock their potential by systematically mapping out their founders’ goals, current reality and options for growth, and connecting them to national and international mentors and investors, MDeC said.
 
The programme draws on techniques developed by JFDI.Asia for its successful accelerator programme in Singapore, said the national ICT custodian, which manages the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC Malaysia) initiative.
 
A Startup Accelerator Lite pilot project will take place during March in three locations: Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Kota Kinabalu.
 
“The Government’s commitment and our past efforts have resulted in a new wave of successful Malaysian startups that have shown that employing a regional mindset from day one can reap big rewards,” said MDeC chief executive officer Badlisham Ghazali (pic).
 
“Moving forward, MDeC is keen to ‘up’ the maturity of the Malaysian startup scene further by working with partners such JFDI.Asia to globalise our startup community, continue to remove the barriers to entry, and provide access to capital for early-stage ICT startups,” he added.
 
MSC Malaysia Startup Accelerator Lite is an experiment aimed at exploring the impact that a short, intense programme can make to begin forming the kind of tightly-knit local ecosystems that have proved so effective in places like Boulder, Colorado, MDeC said in its statement.
 
Ten years ago, the town of just 100,000 people was nowhere on the map for technology innovation, yet in 2011 it was voted ‘America’s Best Town for Startups’ by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, with 17,000 businesses calling it home, the agency added.
 
“Talk in the tech world nowadays is all about communities. If ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ that’s true for startups too,” said JFDI.Asia cofounder and chief executive officer Hugh Mason (pic).
 
“The work we do is all about bringing people who have different part of the jigsaw needed to build value together, co-creating new businesses.
 
“This pilot project will succeed if we seed a conversation that continues long after us about how local people can come together to build the businesses of tomorrow in Malaysia, so we hope that local business mentors, incubators and other players in the ecosystems we will be visiting will want to participate too,” he added.
 
The MSC Malaysia Startup Accelerator Lite programme is open for application here; interested teams and individuals will find further information about application criteria, dates for each venue and terms of participation.
 
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