KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysia Research Accelerator for Technology and Innovation, MRANTI, an agency under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), today announced that it will be opening a 2,000 sq ft MakersLab in May.
This is in line with the body's effort to ramp up its technology-savvy talent pool and its innovation portfolio, which will put Malaysia further along the path to achieve a high income country status.
According to MRANTI, the new learning and development centre will offer a spectrum of 4IR focussed tools, technologies and technology immersion programmes, aimed at gathering communities for greater experimentation and collaboration in a bid to increase local inventions.
"Opportunities in artificial intelligence, automation, electrification, data science, cloud computing and 3D printing are booming. However, many reports show that Malaysia needs more scientists, engineers, technologists to fill critical occupations as we enter the 4IR era - just as much as we need to up-end our innovation commercialisation rate," said MRANTI chief executive officer, Dzuleira Abu Bakar.
"While roadshows allow us to reach all corners of Malaysia to fan interest in technology and innovation, a central hub allows for the meeting of minds. This is where ideas for impact are sparked, where thought and tinkering become a thing," she said.
According to a KPMG survey, Kuala Lumpur is among the top 10 cities in Asia Pacific seen as a leading technology innovation hub.
"We want to maintain our competitive edge. This requires us to cultivate ideas from an early stage, effectively transition and scale them for sustainable impact," said Dzuleira.
"As a connector, MRANTI aims to match solutions to problems, MakersLab would be a springboard to cultivate creative and innovative problem-solving skills from within the community," she said.
Located at MRANTI Park in Bukit Jalil, MRANTI MakersLab will offer innovators, students and hobbyists with quick, affordable and convenient access to tools, equipment, space and knowledge for the rapid prototyping of solutions. It is also ideal for sandboxing smaller scale ideas and tinkering of hardware and software in a dedicated space.
"Between April and May, a pop-up makerspace will serve as a prelude to MRANTI's MakersLab and we invite school students, youth and the STEM community to come over to realise their ideas now. Visits are currently by appointment basis for best maker experience," said Dzuleira.
She explained that MRANTI's MakersLab adds to the suite of MRANTI Park's 686 acre integrated facilities for end-to-end research, development, commercialisation and innovation services.
MRANTI Park currently hosts five Living Labs for dronetech, unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAV), 5G, BioScience (Agriculture, Healthcare, Bioindustry), and 4IR technologies - ideal for stress-testing innovations in a closed environment.
From here, viable products and solutions can be brought on to real-world test beds including the National Technology & Innovation Sandbox sites for live environment testing, and further, primed for industrial-scale contract manufacturing, consulting and a host of go-to-market programmes at MRANTI Engineering and MRANTI Nexus facilities.
"Ultimately we want to increase the R&D commercial output of local innovations," she said.
Talent time
At the MRANTI's World Engineering Day launch recently, Dzuleira shared that one of the key measures for Malaysia to achieve the high tech nation status is having a 1 to 100 engineer to population ratio.
According to the Board of Engineers, Malaysia (BEM), the engineer to population ratio for Malaysia is 1:174.
"There is a high demand for engineers and the skills gap in engineering will negatively affect areas of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in terms of clean energy, sustainable cities and climate action," said Dzuleira.
"At MRANTI's MakersLab, we want to foster a culture of learning-by-doing, innovation, hands on exploration here - where the community can be involved in the shaping of world-class Malaysian-made inventions which could someday be applied to address critical societal and planetary issues," she said.