Week in Review: Futurist Michio Kaku stresses education is key to participation

• Malaysian government promises closer links to industry to drive innovation
• GEC Summit and satellite events makes for busiest week in digital ecosystem

THE largest entrepreneurial event in the Malaysian tech ecosystem just ended earlier this week with the Global Entrepreneurial Community Summit held in Kuala Lumpur. While entrepreneurship cuts across all sectors and the 2-day GEC Summit 2017 covered a broad scope, it still had a digital heavy focus, and rightly so as digital technologies can be applied to all sectors.

Beyond the 2-day summit that was the anchor event, there were a number of satellite events as well with a business angel and a tech conference, a large number of digital economy related short labs as well and also the introduction of the concept of Superclusters, with a few three hour sessions on topics such as mobility, green tech, smart cities (which I attended).

All contributed to making the week of Dec 11 to 15, the busiest and most interesting week in the tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem in Malaysia.

Our coverage starts with an interview (with video) with reknown physicist/futurist, Michio Kaku with another article on the government laying down its determination to work closer with the ecosystem to drive accelerated innovation.

And tomorrow (Monday) you can read about China’s much talked about Belt and Road Intitiative and how the Digital Free Trade Zone falls under that umbrella initiative.

Also upcoming next week, you can read about my conversation with Christian Rangen who has made it his raison d’etre to drive accelerated innovation through the creation of Superclusters.

I started my conversation with Rangen by sharing that his focus on super speeding the creation of startups felt reckless and he pondered for a while and replied, smiling, “That’s a word that has been used to describe me before.” Needless to say, we had a good conversation.

So watch out for that article and do read the Kaku article as there are some really interesting ideas there and he also reemphasizes that education is of paramount importance for anyone to take part and be a recipient of the bounty that the disruptive new tech-heavy economy will bring.

And actually, the talk by Kaku was also attended by my 14-year old who wanted to listen in person to Kaku after having watched him online. And even my 11-year old wanted to go listen but I felt he was too young to attend the summit. Was I right or still to old fashioned in my thinking!?

A final thought on large scale entrepreneur events like the GEC Summit and its satellite events, you actually see very few established entrepreneurs there, and here I refer specifically to DNA’s Digerati50 from the 2014 & 2016 batches. I guess, it is true for all tech related conferences, if there is no compelling reason for the entrepreneur to be there, to meet specific people or they are speaking, very few will have the luxury of time to attend for knowledge enrichment and networking.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a productive week ahead.  

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