KUALA LUMPUR, 19 April. – UNIVERSITI Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and SRI International (founded as Stanford Research Institute)), Menlo Park, California will benefit from an intelligent collaboration to improve the commercialisation strategies for UTM’s most promising research products.
The two institutions today signed a memorandum of agreement in Impiana Hotel, KLCC to further investigate the collaboration initiatives that relate to professional activities, particularly in the area of innovation strategies and processes.
UTM has identified the need to commercialise more of its research products to the local and international market aligned with the university’s goal to achieve better Research University (RU) purpose. An effort on polishing its research output has been the best step to benefit the RU fund distributed by the government.
The recent series of Commercialisation Readiness Workshops nurtures UTM’s researchers focus to generate more valuable Intellectual Property and prepare them for commercialisation. This effort includes several processes such as exposing UTM’s researchers and staff to SRI’s 5 Disciplines of Innovation (5DOI) program, a set of innovation best practices for developing accountable and sustainable business models, determining go‐to-market plans, building sound business plans, and delivering value to customers.
By engaging with SRI since 2010, UTM personnel have participated in various executive briefings and programs for researchers and staff, starting with the first twenty‐seven (27) UTM researchers and staff who were trained in the SRI 5 Disciplines of Innovation program (5DOI), partially through AKEPT sponsorship.
Several research teams were trained to pitch their value propositions in extended “venture capital‐like” sessions. These sessions have benefitted many UTM research teams, officials and staff. In addition, by forming this partnership, several UTM products have been advanced from research and development phases to commercialisation strategies.
At the end of this program, UTM hopes to generate sustainable and innovative technologies that are commercialized successfully and to continue to improve its remarkable research and development capabilities.