Maxis and MDEC collaborate to foster corporate innovation, empowering businesses in digital economy
- Maxis and MDEC commence year-long collaboration on corporate innovation initiatives, leveraging market access, mentorship for startups or corporates, events and engagements, as well as solving problem statements
- Maxis and MDEC to jointly organise digital Design Thinking workshop for corporations as first of these initiatives
- Maxis committed to accelerating innovation and digital transformation to enable businesses in Malaysia to Always Be Ahead
Maxis and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) are collaborating to promote corporate innovation among businesses in Malaysia – from startups or large corporations – to stimulate the ecosystem and spur the country’s digital economy. The partnership was formalised with both parties signing a Memorandum of Understanding detailing the framework for its mutual cooperation.
Through the year-long collaboration, Maxis and MDEC will jointly develop mentorships and programmes to provide coaching to startups and corporates embarking on their digital transformation journeys. Additionally, both parties will facilitate events and engagements that will foster a conducive environment for networking and collaboration between startups as well as larger corporations to generate business leads for the industry and accelerate corporate innovation.
“In this challenging and increasingly competitive business environment, we firmly believe that innovation will be a key success factor in re-evaluating business models and digital transformation strategies. Our collaboration with MDEC is therefore an important one as it allows us to collectively provide the right tools, support, and resources, so that we can bring together the best of technologies to help businesses to always be ahead in a changing world. We look forward to exploring and co-creating initiatives to fuel corporate innovation in Malaysia,” said Gokhan Ogut, Chief Executive Officer, Maxis.
MDEC CEO Surina Shukri lauded Maxis’ proactive stance in supporting organisations to take the digital leap and heighten their readiness for IR4.0. She further encouraged Malaysia-based MNCs to join the effort to build the nation’s digital ecosystem and support local digitally-empowered businesses to grow globally.
“Corporations like Maxis possess market knowledge, resources, established networks, and the validation that all businesses aspire to attain; tech startups possess the agility and novel ideas that corporations value. MDEC aims to harness these complementary strengths, which will not only advance the nation’s digital agenda but potentially lead to the creation of deep-tech solutions in our backyard that could shape the way we solve the most pressing global issues. We look forward to fostering more corporate partnerships to attract digital investments to the country and augment Malaysia’s pursuit to be the Heart of Digital ASEAN,” said Surina.
As the first of their joint initiatives, Maxis and MDEC will be launching a digital Design Thinking workshop for MDEC’s corporate partners in October. The two-week workshop aims to promote the use of Design Thinking as a methodology to deeply understand problem statements of companies and challenge assumptions in an attempt to solve them in a creative and innovative way.
Collaborating to accelerate the digital economy
Maxis and MDEC have been collaborating on several fronts since last year, with a shared goal of accelerating the digitalisation of the businesses in Malaysia in line with the Government’s digital economy agenda. Some of its key initiatives include the ecosystem development of IoT in May 2019, which saw the launching of the immensely popular Maxis IoT Challenge and the launch of its second installation on 4 September. MDEC was also a key partner for Maxis’ Market Access Day, the largest pitching session that provided a platform for 100 startups to showcase their ideas to approximately 70 of Malaysia’s leading corporates, venture capitalists and angel investors, for business matching and networking opportunities.
Recently, Maxis was identified as a Technology Solutions Provider by MDEC for the SME Digitalisation Grant under Budget 2020, which enabled Maxis to offer the widest range of connectivity and digital solutions to help SMEs achieve their digitalisation aspirations. Meanwhile, through its flagship community programme, eKelas, Maxis is currently working with MDEC to repurpose the latter’s STEM content and develop learning videos for eKelas students. Concurrently, Maxis is supporting MDEC’s various initiatives under its #mydigitalmaker movement via content sharing and capacity building in Computer Science.
