Mesiniaga launches intra-preneurship with MaGIC

• Aims to launch eight new, market-ready products or services by end 2018
• CEO hopes to transform culture into one that instills innovation, discovery

MALAYSIAN Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC) announced a strategic partnership yesterday with Mesiniaga Bhd (Mesiniaga), a public listed technology vendor, to collaborate on the newly-launched Bright Side Innovation Lab (Bright Side).

Bright Side aims to instill a culture of innovation in Mesiniaga, encouraging creative thinking to solve problems, promoting and supporting entrepreneurship, as well as reducing the time required to build and deploy quality solutions. It will provide Mesiniaga’s employees with an avenue to validate business ideas, equip themselves with the crucial skills and capabilities, and bring their products to market with the help of accelerator partners.

Wan Mohd Fusil, Chairman and CEO of Mesiniaga Berhad notes that, "In the past few years, we have seen numerous changes in the IT industry that came about rapidly. To always help our customers succeed we must continuously reinvent ourselves; if we want to stay relevant for the next decade, it is necessary for us to embrace the culture of innovation and change. We must transform into a culture that instills innovation and discovery as our daily practice, making us at par with the ever-evolving industry around us.”

Together with Mesiniaga, MaGIC will actively participate in Bright Side by offering advisory and mentorship support, providing training and workshops to build capabilities, as well as sharing its extensive knowledge and experience in running accelerators.

Bright Side will be integrated into the structure of Mesiniaga and be modelled after a pre accelerator program, with a focus on validating business idea and designing a go-to-market strategy. It will have six key stages: problem solicitation; idea submission; idea selection; business design and selection; development, go-to-market and validation; as well as funding and spin-off. MaGIC will help facilitate the startup collaboration process during the fifth stage - development, go-to-market, and validation - where 16 minimum viable products (MVPs) are shortlisted.

The innovation lab aims to launch eight new, market-ready products or services by the end of 2018. These new solutions will either be introduced as a new offering within Mesiniaga, or spun-off into a stand-alone subsidiary to open the door to wider market opportunities.

“Intrapreneurs help companies move forward and future-proof their business. They are the essential building blocks of a company’s development – their out of the box thinking means they drive innovation from within, seeking new solutions to unique, market-driven problems," said Ashran Dato’ Ghazi, CEO of MaGIC. "This is essential to a company’s ability to survive, confront disruption, and stay relevant. We’d like to applaud Mesiniaga for embracing corporate innovation and pioneering our intrapreneurship corporate program.”

MaGIC’s CER arm was launched this year to encourage corporate innovation and drive private sector involvement in Malaysia’s entrepreneurship development. Aside from running innovation programs along with its corporate partners, it also operates MaGIC CER Circle and MaGIC Activate. MaGIC CER Circle is a platform to connect corporates with startup communities to help them capitalize on disruptive technologies and build a continuous innovation pipeline through partnership. MaGIC Activate helps corporates conduct innovation challenges and reach out to more startups.

MaGIC now has 42 partners in its MaGIC CER Circle program who have posted 11 innovation challenges in MaGIC Activate’s Open Innovation Challenge Platform. The platform is run in partnership with the Techstar Startup Program, which provides corporates with access to more than 3,000 startups.