Prepared by: AP. Dr. Rossilah Jamil
Featuring our expert in entrepreneurship and innovation, Dr. Ramesh Zaidi Rozan, Associate Professor in Information Systems at Azman Hashim International Business School (AHIBS). Previously, he served as the Director of UTM XCITE, a university-level centre for innovation and entrepreneurship building between UTM community and external stakeholders.
Dr. Ramesh has more than 27 years of experience in the related field and received education in Japan. Since 2013, he has accumulated 1.53 million industry grants and 2.03 million public grants from the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia on projects relating to entrepreneurship development. He formerly held several non-academic and academic positions in private and government organisations and has also been an entrepreneur since 1993.
Actively involved in coaching and mentoring start-ups, he has assisted many projects or enterprises owned by young entrepreneurs. This involves mostly technologically-driven enterprises within the domain of Computing and Electronics. One of his proudest recent projects is a business by Mr. Mohamad Faiz Zainuddin.
Faiz first started his entrepreneurship journey at UTM by leading Koperasi Mahasiswa UTM. Through Dr. Ramesh’s coaching and mentoring, Faiz set up a mushroom farming experiment which later officially called the Muscho Enterprise. The venture has a bright future given the inadequate supply of mushrooms in the market. Faiz recently won a big grant from Iskandar Regional Development Authority (IRDA) to implement Mushroom Indoor Farming System.
Dr. Ramesh’s assistance to budding entrepreneurs like Faiz does not stop when students graduated from UTM. In 2016, he was awarded the 1st Runner Up for Best Mentor Award 2016 by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia.
Dr. Ramesh remarked that developing students towards becoming start-ups is very rewarding. Mentors need to assess and help protégés differentiate between interest and commitment as this will make a big difference to their entrepreneurship journey. To quote a management guru – “When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”
His strengths rely on having acquired experience in the whole value chain of research, innovation and commercialisation, and entrepreneurship/enterprise development, which is often missing among general academicians. Dr. Ramesh continues his professional development, having recently attended the International Visitor Leadership Program USA, led the Impact Digital Entrepreneurship Apprentice@KPT, and pursued IBM-Simplilearn Data Scientist Master Program.
Dr. Ramesh can be contacted at https://people.utm.my/mdzaidi/.