Riverside Majestic Hotel, Kuching
09 March 2011

Yang Berhormat Dato’ Jacob Dungau Sagan
Timbalan Menteri Perdagangan Antarabangsa dan Industri (MITI)

Yang Berusaha Encik Suhaimy Abdul Talib,
Pengarah MPC Wilayah Sarawak

Para pembentang kertas kerja, tetamu-tetamu kehormat, wakil-wakil organisasi dan para peserta seminar sekalian,

1. First and foremost, i would like to welcome and thank Yang Berhormat Dato’ Jacob Dungau Sagan for his willingness to deliver his keynote address and to officiate The Seminar On Creating Excellent Organisation Through Creativity And Innovation. I believe that the continuous support given by Yang Berhormat Dato’ to MPC programmes will drive us to work harder in the future.

YB Dato’, ladies and gentlemen,

2. Let me tell briefly what is creativity and innovation about and remind why it is important to the organisation as well as for the country. Often the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ are used interchangeably and many of us treated these two words as synonyms.

3. Creativity may be defined as ‘idea generation’; means that to be creative is to be able to generate or to come up with ideas or  to gather ideas. The new idea can be simple or it can be complex. Hence, creativity is a thinking process. What is ‘created’ or ‘generated’ is the idea.

4. On the hand, innovation can be described as ‘creativity implemented’. It means that innovation is putting the idea into practice. Innovation is a productive process and it adds value to the idea, leading to the creation of a new product, process or service. For example, if the idea is likened to a seed, then innovation is the plant that results from planting and nurturing the seed.

5. Experts have identified many types of innovation such as ‘product innovation’ that entails the introduction of a new product or a service that is new or considerably improved. Meanwhile ‘process innovation’ comprises the implementation of a new or a significantly enhanced production or delivery method. Another type is ‘supply chain innovation’ in which innovations transform the sourcing of input products from the market and the delivery of output products to customers; and ‘marketing innovation’, which results in the evolution of new methods of marketing with enhancements in product design or packaging, promotion or pricing. Thus the importance of innovation has to be taken seriously, for us to move ahead particularly the business organisations in order to be more competitive. Today’s seminar i believe will shed much of the insights and aproaches for us to plan and act accordingly to our business needs.

YB Dato’, ladies and gentlemen,

6. As the global playing field becomes increasingly level, many business forecasters predict that workforce creativity and innovation will be the important factor in establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage. However, the current survey carried out by Olympus, entitled fortune 1000 executives’ perspective on enterprise innovation found that while the vast majority of the 304 executives who responded believe that enterprise innovation is extremely important, 53% believe that their organisations are not doing enough to promote innovation. The survey identifies 5 top barriers to enterprise innovation:

1. Too much focus pressure to achieve short-term goals or quick results;
2. Other business goals/objectives take priority;
3. Lack of time;
4. Lack of incentives to inspire or reward innovation; and
5. Lack of systems or tools for fostering  enterprise innovation.

7. To improve enterprise innovation, the survey proposed the companies to take the following actions:

• Creating a corporate culture that encourages innovation, event at the risk of failure;
• Allocating budget to innovation initiatives;
• Rewarding innovation with recognition or other non-financial incentives;
• Rewarding innovation by providing financial incentives; and
• Leading by examples by personally participating in the innovation process.

YB Dato’ , ladies and gentlemen,

8. I would like to take this opportunity to inform that  MPC is currently is focusing its activities towards creativity and innovation aspect on particularly related with process innovation. On the last 4th  March 2011, MPC Sarawak Regional Office had successfully organised A Forum On Modernising Business Regulations. Apart from that, in 2011,  several process innovation programmes such as Business Excellent Framework (BE) and Enterprise Innovation Intervention Programmes (EIIP) are being introduced to industries by MPC.

9. These programmes focus on developing a system to diagnose the innovative state of the companies, improve innovation process along the innovation value chain and monitor success of its interventions to improve the innovativeness of companies.

10. In conclusion, MPC would always support the industries and other related parties to enculturise creativity and innovation in their organisations .

11. Once again, thank you Yang Berhormat Dato’ for your time to be with us this morning to officiate our meaningful seminar.

Thank you.